repo name change broke GitHub action references

[jraymakers]

We (MotherDuck) have an (internal) GitHub workflow that referenced mymindstorm/setup-emsdk@v14. It started breaking (with: "Error: Unable to resolve action. Repository not found: mymindstorm/setup-emsdk") soon after this repo was changed to be under emscripten-core instead of mymindstorm. After diagnosing the problem, changing our reference to emscripten-core/setup-emsdk@v14 appears to work.

I suspect others will be impacted by this, including duckdb-wasm.

[mymindstorm]

Hey, thanks for the heads up! This appears to be a regression in GitHub itself or your workflow/org settings. If your org has a support contract with GitHub, could you create an incident and point them here?

Reasoning:

1. I can see it working in public workflows after the rename
   • https://github.com/PyO3/maturin/actions/runs/24164985597/job/70524549710#step:10:1
   • https://github.com/pandas-dev/pandas/actions/runs/24161744455/job/70514479272#step:4:1
2. I cannot reproduce in a quick test actions workflow:
   • https://github.com/mymindstorm/actions-rename-issue-test/actions/runs/24172938115/job/70548256038
3. GitHub Actions documentation states that old references should be automatically resolved to the new name

Even if this was an issue on our end, I would be unable to do anything to fix it. GitHub does not allow me to re-create a repository with the old name after moving it because of its widespread use.

[jraymakers]

Very interesting. Glad it's not as widespread as I thought. I'll check whether there's something specific in our environment that caused this to fail for us, but not others.

[jraymakers]

I believe this may be due to our use of self-hosted runners. Here's an excerpt from a Claude-guided analysis:

GitHub-hosted vs. self-hosted action resolution

When a GitHub repo is transferred (mymindstorm/setup-emsdk → emscripten-core/setup-emsdk), GitHub sets up an HTTP redirect at the API level. Whether that redirect is followed depends on how the runner resolves actions:

GitHub-hosted runners resolve uses: references through GitHub's internal infrastructure. The redirect is handled server-side — the runner may never even see the old org name, because GitHub's internal action resolution service resolves it to the current location before the runner downloads anything.

Self-hosted runners resolve actions by making calls to the public GitHub API from outside GitHub's infrastructure. The runner software downloads action archives from endpoints like api.github.com/repos/{owner}/{repo}/tarball/{ref}. If the runner's HTTP client or the Actions Service API code path doesn't properly follow 301 redirects for transferred repos, the download fails.