fix: Publish stage always skipped due to boolean expression mismatch in publish pipeline

[Saadnajmi]

Problem

The Publish to NPM stage in azure-pipelines.publish.yml is always skipped, even when there are tarballs and skipNpmPublish is false.

Root Cause

The stage condition uses:

not(${{ parameters.skipNpmPublish }})

This mixes compile-time template expansion (${{ }}) with a runtime expression function (not()).

At compile time, ${{ parameters.skipNpmPublish }} expands to the YAML boolean string False (capital F). In Azure DevOps runtime expressions, False is not the boolean keyword false — it's a non-empty string, which is always truthy. So not(truthy) → false, and the entire and(...) short-circuits to false.

This happens regardless of the parameter value — both True and False are non-empty strings, both truthy, both negated to false.

Fix

Replace not(${{ parameters.skipNpmPublish }}) with:

ne('${{ parameters.skipNpmPublish }}', 'true')

This uses ne() (not-equal) with a string comparison. Azure DevOps ne() is case-insensitive for strings, so:

Parameter value	Expansion	Comparison	Result
false (default)	ne('False', 'true')	not equal	✅ true — stage runs
true	ne('True', 'true')	equal	✅ false — stage skipped