The canary walked one path on one machine — a mesh comes up, a module
lands, a consumer gets a credential — and stopped the run if it broke.
That path is exactly what the first three tests of the long run walk,
and the long run finishes them about 160 seconds in.
So the gate cost a whole scenario on every passing run to save roughly
45 seconds on a failing one. A scenario is three machines, one of them a
registry that boots a kernel in order to serve files, which is where the
two minutes went.
The test file stays and still runs when it is named. What is gone is
raising it on the way to everything else.
Measured rather than argued: the canary's scenario took 116s of which
60s was standing up a registry, and the run reached the same assertions
without it.
Suggested by Jochen, and it paid for itself on its first run.
A suite that takes forty minutes is a suite you hear from once a day.
Every fault found today would have shown up in the first three minutes
of it — a module pinned to an image that does not exist, a consumer
given a password and no name to present with it, a credential file
nothing could read, a search for a password that read the password as an
option. The other thirty-seven minutes proved things that were already
working.
So this runs first, on one machine, with the three images the mesh needs
for itself. It walks one path: a mesh comes up, a module lands, and a
consumer gets a credential it can actually use — the name to present,
the address, the port, and a password only the host could put there.
Deliberately not a smaller copy of the full suite: that path is where
everything went wrong, and a canary checking many things shallowly is a
canary whose failure nobody can read.
`suite` runs it and stops if it dies, saying why rather than leaving
somebody to wonder what the missing thirty-seven minutes would have
said. Skipped when the caller named its own files.
It measured 164 seconds against forty-odd minutes, and failed three
times on its first run for one reason: applying the bundle raises a
control plane but does not tell it a machine exists. I had left out
enrolment, and the long suite would have taken forty minutes to say so.
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