5.3. Distribution and Maintenance
💡 First Principle: Publishing an action is a promise to strangers that a given reference will keep behaving as documented — so distribution choice and versioning discipline are less about mechanics than about the compatibility contract you're agreeing to maintain.
Why care: consumers pin to your versions and build pipelines on them. Break a v2 and you break their production deploys with no warning; never release a v2 and you can never fix a design mistake. The versioning conventions below exist precisely so consumers can choose their own risk posture — automatic patches, or frozen bytes.
⚠️ Common Misconception: "Any repository can publish to the Marketplace, including private ones." Marketplace publishing requires a public repository containing a single action with action.yml at the root, plus two-factor authentication on the account and acceptance of the Marketplace terms. Private and internal actions are shared through repository access settings, not the Marketplace.
