The danger is not that the suite breaks. It is that nobody notices it
stopped running (novox/hq 04-ISSUES/005). The harness this replaces had
not built for two and a half months and nothing said so — and this suite
needs a hypervisor, so it inherits exactly that: it runs when somebody
remembers, and remembering is not a mechanism.
So running, recording, and rebuilding are one act:
- the host binary, control-plane image and builder are rebuilt from
source first. The last two both parse manifests; building one and not
the other left a binary eleven hours old refusing a field the mesh had
just renamed, found by a full run.
- a receipt lands in XDG state — outside git, because the question is
whether *this machine* has run it, and a receipt in git would be a
claim about everybody's machine made by whoever committed last.
- `last-run` judges it and exits non-zero when it no longer counts.
Three faults found by running the thing rather than reading it, each now
held by a test confirmed to fail without it:
- counted() passed every test while parsing nothing. The runner colours
its summary even into a pipe; the fixtures were clean text that had
been imagined rather than captured. A fixture that agrees with the
mistake proves the mistake.
- a receipt for `suite test/lastrun.test.ts` was indistinguishable from
one for the real thing — 005's own symptom, rebuilt inside its remedy.
The receipt now records what ran.
- a tree with uncommitted work reported the bare commit, claiming
coverage of code nobody can check out. Nothing else could tell: the
hash is identical either way.
Proven on real machines: 22/22, against all three repositories.