Operator rule 2026-10-29: image creation, hosting and lifecycle belong to CI/CD, never to a workstation build/push. Nothing had ever been pushed to the Gitea registry. - .gitea/workflows/images.yaml + scripts/images.sh: PRs build+verify (no credential); main builds, verifies and pushes toolbox, agent-runner (FROM toolbox) and conformance-runner as sha-<commit> + main, reading the digest back from the registry. Only changed images build. - Each image's own build-image.sh does the build and in-image verification, now engine-neutral (DinD: no podman-only calls, probe over stdin not a bind mount). New toolbox build-image.sh. - Digest references carry `# renovate-digest:` markers; renovate.json5 gains a custom.regex manager for them. The worker Job template is deliberately untracked (it would loop). - renovate.yaml pins renovate-version 44.167.0: the action's default (39.264.0) rejects the current config's managerFilePatterns, so every run would have died at CONFIG_VALIDATION. - Push credential: REGISTRY_PUSH_TOKEN secret; the Actions token has no package scope in Gitea 1.24.3 (container.go Authenticate). Retention: infra/gitea/registry-retention.sh. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <[email protected]>