The verdict logic was right; the waiting was impossible. Gitea's runner kills
a step at ~15 minutes. monsoon runs 56 and 60 stopped producing output at
14m29s and 14m30s after step start — within one second of each other, with
perfectly regular 31s heartbeats right up to the cut — while their COPR builds
carried on and succeeded at 10:15:20 and 11:34:55. The job was then marked
failed by a reaper ticking at :05:50/:20:50/:35:50/:50:50.
So the step was never going to survive a ~25 minute build, and every fix so
far addressed a real defect that was not this one.
Default the wait budget to 720s, comfortably inside the limit, and change what
expiry means: a build still running is reported with its URL and exits 0,
because it has not failed. A build that reaches failed or canceled inside the
budget still fails the job, which catches the early failures that make up most
build breakage. Skip the artifact download entirely when the build has not
finished, since there is nothing to fetch and no time to spend.
The trade is explicit: a build that fails after the budget will not be caught
by CI. That is strictly better than the previous behaviour of failing every
successful build and blocking dependent jobs.