A run today had a control-plane image built that minute and a
provisioner image built the day before. The rotation test failed against
a real database and it looked exactly like the change under test being
wrong — the provisioner was creating logins by a naming rule that had
been replaced hours earlier.
It was the rebuild. It covered `make image` and the builder binary and
none of the three other image targets, all of which the suite runs.
This is the same fault the builder line was added for, one target along,
and the comment there already names the precedent: building one and not
the other is the eleven-hour-old binary. A rebuild that covers most of
what a run uses is worse than one that covers none, because the run that
follows it is believed.
The test names each target rather than counting them, because what goes
wrong is a target that exists and is not run, and a count would not
notice.
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.
jschoubben