[CI] release-please workflow failing — "value at path package.version is not tagged" (manifest/config mismatch)

[cerebral-work]

Summary

The release-please workflow fails on every push to main. The error indicates a mismatch between the version value in the release-please manifest and the expected tag format.

Affected Runs

Run ID	Date	SHA
29469385591	2026-07-16	d1ad313b
29232051435	2026-07-13	0f883f72
24078358505	2026-04-07	e09ec977

This failure appears to predate the Chrome/CI failure — it has been failing since at least April 2026.

Error

##[error]release-please failed: value at path package.version is not tagged

Root Cause Hypothesis

This error from google-github-actions/release-please-action@v4 occurs when the version field in the release-please manifest (.release-please-manifest.json) does not match the version tag format expected by the strategy, or when the manifest references a version that was never properly tagged in the repository.

Possible causes:

1. The .release-please-manifest.json contains a version like 0.x.y but no corresponding v0.x.y tag exists in the repo (or the tag was created with a non-standard format).
2. The release-please-config.json specifies a versioning-strategy or package-name that does not align with the current manifest state.
3. A manual version bump was committed to the manifest without going through the release-please flow, leaving the manifest version orphaned from any git tag.

Suggested Fix Direction

• Run release-please bootstrap or manually reconcile .release-please-manifest.json with the existing tags in the repo (git tag -l).
• Check whether the version in .release-please-manifest.json has a corresponding v<version> git tag. If not, either create the missing tag pointing to the correct commit, or reset the manifest version to match the latest existing tag.
• Review release-please-config.json for any strategy settings (e.g., include-component-in-tag: true/false) that might change the expected tag format.

Filed by CI/Ops Watchdog — 2026-07-16