[mraible]

The Build and Publish Imperative Images workflow has failed on every push to main since August 10, at the Helidon native build. Because Helidon builds first, the Micronaut, Quarkus, and Spring Boot imperative images haven't been published since then either.

Two separate problems were in the way:

• Static build: GraalVM 25 rejects --static unless it uses musl libc. Helidon's own template uses GraalVM 21, where the static glibc build fails to link with undefined reference to `__xmknod'. This is Building Dockerfile.native fails helidon-io/helidon#10767. I applied the second workaround a Helidon maintainer recommends there: drop -Dnative.image.buildStatic and run on oraclelinux:9-slim instead of scratch. The first workaround (musl) only works on x86, and the reporter hit runtime errors with it.
• Startup crash: The native app then exited with NoSuchMethodException: RoleAnnotationAnalyzer.init(io.helidon.common.config.Config). Since 4.4, Helidon's AnnotationAnalyzer uses DeprecationSupport.isOverridden() to check by reflection whether an analyzer overrides a deprecated init method, and the native image has no reflection metadata for it. The same crash happens with GraalVM 21. A new reflect-config.json registers public methods for both annotation analyzers on the classpath.

I built the Docker image locally with Dockerfile.native on arm64. The app started in 23 ms, returned 401 for /hello without a token, and returned 200 for /health. The image is 218 MB, up from a static binary on scratch.