gastownhall/beads · error

marshaling Linear milestone metadata: %w

Error message

marshaling Linear milestone metadata: %w

What it means

After merging the existing metadata with the Linear milestone fields (title, targetDate, etc.), the function re-serializes the map with json.Marshal. Marshaling a map[string]interface{} built from valid values essentially never fails in Go unless a value contains an unsupported type (e.g. a channel or func snuck in via the parsed existing data), but the error is wrapped defensively.

Source

Thrown at cmd/bd/linear.go:706

	}

	linearMeta, _ := data["linear"].(map[string]interface{})
	if linearMeta == nil {
		linearMeta = make(map[string]interface{})
	}
	linearMeta["kind"] = "project_milestone"
	linearMeta["project_milestone"] = map[string]interface{}{
		"id":          strings.TrimSpace(ms.ID),
		"name":        ms.Name,
		"description": ms.Description,
		"progress":    ms.Progress,
		"targetDate":  ms.TargetDate,
	}
	data["linear"] = linearMeta

	raw, err := json.Marshal(data)
	if err != nil {
		return nil, fmt.Errorf("marshaling Linear milestone metadata: %w", err)
	}
	return json.RawMessage(raw), nil
}

func issueHasLinearMilestoneID(issue *types.Issue, milestoneID string) bool {
	if issue == nil || len(issue.Metadata) == 0 {
		return false
	}
	var data struct {
		Linear struct {
			Kind             string `json:"kind"`
			ProjectMilestone struct {
				ID string `json:"id"`
			} `json:"project_milestone"`
		} `json:"linear"`
	}
	if err := json.Unmarshal(issue.Metadata, &data); err != nil {
		return false

View on GitHub (pinned to 71377f2769)

Solutions

1. Inspect the issue's metadata for unsupported/garbage values and reset it to a plain JSON object
2. Retry the sync; if persistent, report the metadata content that triggers it as a bug
3. Update bd to the latest version in case the merge logic changed

if _, err := json.Marshal(data); err != nil {
	// abort before calling the sync API
}

raw, err := mergedLinearMilestoneMetadata(existing, ms)
if err != nil {
	return fmt.Errorf("merge milestone metadata failed: %w", err)
}

When it happens

Trigger: json.Marshal fails on the merged metadata map — practically only when existing parsed metadata contained values of unsupported types that survive into the output map.

Common situations: Extremely rare; typically indicates corrupted or programmatically injected metadata with non-JSON-encodable values. Most users will never see this.

Related errors

• existing milestone metadata is not a JSON object: %w
• failed to marshal request: %w
• failed to marshal metadata: %w
• failed to marshal merged metadata: %w
• failed to marshal metadata: %w

AI-assisted analysis of gastownhall/beads@71377f2769 (2026-08-30). Data as JSON: /api/errors/dfb699959d9c7c4a. Report an issue: GitHub.