ci: wire the real release deployment signal

[svvarom]

The nightly run showed Signal deployment as skipped. That looked like the real deployment handoff, but inspection revealed it was still an echo-only placeholder; the actual dispatch lived in a separate job with a different name.

Consolidating those jobs exposed the reason both had skipped: nightlies intentionally skip stable-only release registration, and GitHub propagates that skipped state through dependent jobs unless they explicitly evaluate their own status. Artifact polling already handled that case and succeeded, but deployment signaling did not.

This PR makes the real dispatch the single signal-deployment job. It now runs only when the workflow was not cancelled, artifact polling succeeded, Helm was selected, and the run is not a dry run. The final notification therefore observes the job that actually performs the handoff.

Release state	Deployment signal
Nightly or stable; polling succeeded; Helm selected	Dispatch create-release-deployment with the source SHA, cadence, release label, and Helm version
Nightly skipped stable-only registration	Dispatch still runs after successful polling
Polling failed or the run was cancelled	Skip
Helm not selected or dry run	Skip

The downstream workflow remains responsible for creating the pending GitHub Deployment and completing it independently.

Evidence

• actionlint .github/workflows/release.yaml passes.
• No live release or nightly was triggered while validating this change.

Linear: AIREINF-267 — Create the deployment workflow

[coderabbitai]

No actionable comments were generated in the recent review. 🎉

ℹ️ Recent review info

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📥 Commits

Reviewing files that changed from the base of the PR and between ac12328 and db32d44.

📒 Files selected for processing (2)

• .github/workflows/release.yaml
• RELEASING.md

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📝 Walkthrough

Walkthrough

The release workflow now conditionally dispatches a deployment signal after successful final artifact polling for non-dry-run Helm releases. The release guide documents downstream pending-deployment creation and independent completion by the deployment controller.

Changes

Helm deployment signaling

Layer / File(s)	Summary
Conditional deployment signal .github/workflows/release.yaml	signal-deployment now requires successful final polling, Helm inclusion, and non-dry-run execution before dispatching the deployment event with the staged Helm version. The previous placeholder job was removed.
Release flow documentation RELEASING.md	The Helm release process now documents downstream pending Deployment creation and controller completion; non-Helm releases skip signaling.

Sequence Diagram(s)

sequenceDiagram
  participant ReleaseWorkflow
  participant ReleaseRepository
  participant DeploymentController
  ReleaseWorkflow->>ReleaseRepository: Dispatch create-release-deployment with stage-helm version
  ReleaseRepository->>DeploymentController: Create pending GitHub Deployment
  DeploymentController->>ReleaseRepository: Complete deployment

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Possibly related PRs

• NVIDIA-NeMo/nemo-platform#623: Introduced the unified release workflow containing the deployment-signaling placeholder.
• NVIDIA-NeMo/nemo-platform#668: Modified poll-final-release, whose completion now gates deployment signaling.

Suggested reviewers: benmccown

🚥 Pre-merge checks | ✅ 5

✅ Passed checks (5 passed)

Check name	Status	Explanation
Description Check	✅ Passed	Check skipped - CodeRabbit’s high-level summary is enabled.
Title check	✅ Passed	The title clearly matches the main change: wiring the real release deployment signal into CI.
Docstring Coverage	✅ Passed	No functions found in the changed files to evaluate docstring coverage. Skipping docstring coverage check.
Linked Issues check	✅ Passed	Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.
Out of Scope Changes check	✅ Passed	Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.

✨ Finishing Touches

🧪 Generate unit tests (beta)

• Create PR with unit tests
• Commit unit tests in branch AIREINF-267-wire-release-deployment/smuley

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[crookedstorm]

That should do it!

[github-actions]

Suite	Lines Covered	Line Rate	Branch Rate
Unit Tests	24398/31577	77.3%	62.0%
Integration Tests	14020/30226	46.4%	19.3%