The .version PUT fired immediately after CHANGELOG.md created the
next-release branch, racing Gitea's branch indexing. With curl -sf
(fail-silent) any 404/409 produced exit 22 with no body, leaving the
log without diagnostic output.
- Move the branch-readiness poll to run right after CHANGELOG.md commit,
before .version is written.
- Replace silent .version write with a 5-attempt retry loop that logs
HTTP code and body on failure, matching the PR creation block.