Lease the template-update push against the fetched branch

A bare --force-with-lease to a URL has no remote-tracking ref to compare
against, so the push is refused with "stale info" whenever the update
branch already exists. Lease against the ref checkout fetched instead.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

Author: MattFisher

.github/workflows/template-update.yml

@@ -135,7 +135,14 @@ jobs:
           git checkout -b "$BRANCH"
           git add -A
           git commit -m "chore: apply template updates from $REF"
-          git push --force-with-lease \
+          # The push goes to a URL rather than to `origin`, so a bare
+          # --force-with-lease has no remote-tracking ref to compare against
+          # and refuses with "stale info" whenever the branch already exists,
+          # which is every week after a run that pushed but couldn't open its
+          # PR. Lease against what checkout fetched instead; empty means the
+          # branch must not exist yet.
+          expect=$(git rev-parse -q --verify "refs/remotes/origin/$BRANCH" || true)
+          git push --force-with-lease="$BRANCH:$expect" \
             "https://x-access-token:${GH_TOKEN}@github.com/${GITHUB_REPOSITORY}.git" "$BRANCH"
 
           BODY="Applied by \`copier update --vcs-ref $REF\`."

changelog.d/20261007_000000_template_update_push.md

@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
+### Fixed
+
+- `template-update.yml` no longer fails every run once its update branch exists. It pushed with a bare `--force-with-lease` to a URL, which gives git no remote-tracking ref to lease against, so the push was refused with `stale info` whenever the branch was already there. A run that pushed the branch but couldn't open its PR (for example, before the Actions pull-request setting was on) left every later run failing. The push now leases against the branch as checkout fetched it, so it still refuses to overwrite a commit pushed during the run.