On Windows URL.pathname yields /C:/..., which spawnSync then reads as C:\C:\...
and the whole npm test run dies in this one test. Linux CI never caught it
because both spellings coincide there — which is exactly why the canonical gate
lives on Linux and the local run is advisory.
Issue: #133
User-Visible: no
The owner stopped using GitHub Projects. Most of this is wording, but one part
was not: release-prerelease.mjs talked to the Project in code. finishIssues
looked up the project id, listed its items and its Status=Done option, and threw
when an issue was missing from the board — so the first release that closed an
issue would have died on a step with nothing to do with publishing. Found by
reading rather than by releasing, which was luck.
Closing issues stays, and now strips the status label first. That order is not
cosmetic: the invariant that a closed issue carries no status label has broken
twice already, both times because a manual step did it the other way round. The
close-merged job already does it in this order.
The documents now say labels and only labels. The explicit "no longer used"
lines are kept on purpose, in PROCESS.md and next to the code that used to sync:
a decision that vanishes quietly gets reintroduced a month later by someone who
never knew it was made.
Issue: #139
User-Visible: no
Five times in this project a green test meant nothing was checked. The
continuity smoke stayed green after the entire mechanism it guards was cut out.
The golden scene created to protect doorway light was empty — 1,177 warm pixels
against 107,119, all of them icons. The shadow smoke passed while no shadow was
drawn. Each time the test had been written alongside the code, went green at
once, and nobody ever asked whether it could go red.
The gate makes that question routine. Each mutant is a few lines of patch that
reproduce a known breakage, plus the name of the test that must fail on it. A
worktree is patched, the bundle rebuilt, the guard run — and a guard that stays
green fails the gate. Six mutants cover the holes documented in #85; the anchors
are exact strings from today's source, so the registry cannot silently drift —
a unit test that runs with the ordinary suite refuses a stale anchor.
The full run rebuilds the bundle per mutant, so it lives in its own workflow,
before a stable release and on a weekly schedule, not in Validate. The rules for
new tests are written at the top of docs/TESTING.md, and the sixth of them is
the cheapest: an assertion that reads back the property the code just set is
not written at all.
Issue: #85
User-Visible: no
The owner's report: the process works but every stage takes a long time even on
simple bugs. Two causes, and neither was the one that first comes to mind.
The reviewer ran everything regardless. On #89 it installed Chromium, ran all 127
smoke files and a full golden capture — right for a task rated 10/10 for
complexity, absurd for a bug about a room divider. Full suites are the pre-beta
gate; the review now runs typecheck, unit and build always, and smokes, golden,
pytest or performance only where the diff and the AC call for them. The price of
narrowing it is honesty: the reviewer must list which gates it ran, which it did
not, and why, so a skipped gate is a visible decision rather than a silent one.
The reviewer also built its own environment out of model turns, with no npm cache
and no browser cache, paid for from the same forty-five minutes. The workflow now
installs dependencies and Chromium as ordinary cached steps, after switching to
the task branch so the lockfile is the branch's own.
Second, ceremony did not scale down. The light track makes a spec cheap; the new
trivial track does without one — S2-analysis straight to S5-ready, no spec review,
AC in the issue body. It is deliberately hard to qualify for: a bug on one surface,
no new UX contract, no migration, no i18n, no perf or touch effect, three checkable
AC at most, and expected behaviour already on record. Nothing left to decide is the
criterion that holds the whole thing up, and it cannot be met by feeling sure.
Code review is never skipped on either track. It is what stands in for testing
here, so it is the one stage speed may not buy.
Issue: #127
Issue: #128
User-Visible: no
Check 2 compared the Issue trailers against whatever branch the working tree
happened to be on, over whatever range it was given. Those two are not the same
set. After a rebase the CI range widens — `before` points at a discarded commit,
the merge-base slides back, and commits that belong to dev arrive carrying other
issue numbers. Every one of them then looks like a violation.
Running the gate over real history from issue/89 with a dev range produced 26
false refusals out of 26 commits, which would have reddened Validate on the next
force-push of any task branch.
The rule now reads origin/dev..HEAD for its own verdict and leaves the event
range to the other checks. A commit that genuinely carries the wrong trailer for
its branch is still caught; the integration test covers both directions.
Issue: #105
User-Visible: no
PROCESS.md 10.2 describes scripts/process-gate.mjs; the script never existed.
Commits go straight to dev without PRs and GitHub blocks nothing on its side, so
until now the only thing standing between the process and rule #1 was the good
faith of whoever was committing. Hooks catch a violation on the author's machine
but --no-verify walks past them; this job is the catch-up pass that cannot be
skipped locally.
Checks 1-7 offline, 8 through gh, plus the escalation of check 3: a class A
commit with neither a spec file nor the `small` label is a failure, not a
warning. Check 8 is fail closed — an unreachable or closed issue is a refusal,
never a silent pass.
Two things surfaced while wiring it up and are recorded in the script header.
S8-merged had to join the allowed statuses: the pipeline merges into dev before
it moves the label, so Validate reads the issue already advanced and a strict set
would redden every accepted task. And the status question now applies only to
class A/B commits — asking it of a review document would fail every time, since
that document lands while the issue sits in S4-spec-review or S7-code-review.
Issue: #105
User-Visible: no
The HACS submission check does not read hacs.json to find the integration: it
globs `*manifest.json` over the whole clone of the default branch and exits 1
unless there is exactly one (hacs/default, scripts/helpers/integration_path.py).
Three files matched — the two stand-only integrations added on 2026-07-31 and
the golden baseline index added on 2026-08-11 — so the Hassfest job of PR #9004
went red five weeks into the review queue, with a log that named no file.
The stand manifests ship as manifest.template.json and demo/stand/install.sh
renames them at install time; the golden index becomes baselines-index.json
(the exported constant keeps its name, so no consumer changes).
test/repo-hygiene.test.mjs fails if a second manifest ever appears, and the
existing golden-policy assertion — which compared against 'manifest.json' and
happily passed on 'baseline-manifest.json' — now checks the suffix.
Sergey Matyunin