fix(release): declare SECTION_TITLES as associative array

[arnaudlh]

Summary

Fixes the failure in run #25362438095 and a second latent bug discovered when re-running the workflow locally with act.

Bug 1 — feat: unbound variable

In the Generate release notes step, SECTION_TITLES was declared without declare -A:

SECTION_TITLES=(
  [feat]="Features"
  ...
)

Without declare -A, bash treats this as an indexed array assignment, so the keys [feat], [fix] etc. are evaluated as arithmetic expressions. Under set -u, the lookup of unset names like feat fails with unbound variable and the script exits before any release notes are written.

Fix: Add declare -A to SECTION_TITLES. Also collapsed SECTIONS into a single declare -A SECTIONS=(...) for symmetry.

Bug 2 — empty changelog on workflow_dispatch (caught locally with act)

After Bug 1 was fixed, running the workflow locally surfaced a second issue:

fatal: ambiguous argument 'v0.0.1': unknown revision or path not in the working tree

On workflow_dispatch with versions already aligned, bump.outputs.changed == 'false', so the Commit version bump step is skipped — meaning the tag is never created locally. The release-notes step then ran git log v0.0.1 against a non-existent ref, silently producing release notes with an empty changelog (just title + install footer).

This would have shipped a vacuous v0.0.1 release without anyone noticing in CI, because:

• git log runs inside process substitution (< <(git log ...)), which doesn't propagate pipefail
• git describe already had a || echo "" fallback, masking the missing ref

Fix: Probe the ref with git rev-parse --verify and fall back to HEAD when the tag does not yet exist:

if git rev-parse --verify "$TAG" >/dev/null 2>&1; then
  TIP="$TAG"
else
  TIP="HEAD"
fi

Verification

Bug 1 — bash repro

Reproduced locally on bash 5.3.9 (homebrew) — same major.minor as the GitHub Actions runner:

Form	Result
Before (no declare -A on SECTION_TITLES)	feat: unbound variable — exits 1
After (declare -A SECTION_TITLES=(...))	Parses sample feat(plugin): ... commit and emits ### Features with the formatted bullet

Bug 2 — act end-to-end

Re-ran the full workflow locally with act:

act workflow_dispatch -W .github/workflows/git-ape-release.yml \
  -e event.json -s GITHUB_TOKEN=... \
  -P ubuntu-latest=catthehacker/ubuntu:act-latest

Before fix: Generate release notes succeeds but emits empty changelog.
After fix: full conventional-commit-grouped changelog walking from the first commit through HEAD, with sections for Features, Bug Fixes, Documentation, Other Changes, etc.

Excerpt from the local act run on the fixed branch:

## Git-Ape v0.0.1

Initial tagged release.

### Features

- **plugin:** add marketplace settings and release pipelines (`597dd24`)

### Bug Fixes

- **release:** declare SECTION_TITLES as associative array (`6ce7ac9`)
- **website:** keep diagram top reachable when zoomed (`418ea7f`)
...

The Create GitHub release step does fail in act with gh: command not found, but that is a known act limitation (no gh CLI in the container). It is unrelated to the fix and runs fine on real GitHub-hosted runners.

actionlint -color .github/workflows/git-ape-release.yml is clean.

Next step

After merge, re-run Actions → Git-Ape: Plugin Release → workflow_dispatch with version 0.0.1 to cut the first release.

[dawright22]

approve