The read gate stops consulting the unnamed isReady() boolean: every provider
may expose healthReport() (sync, O(1), composed from exact ledgers —
HealthReport with a monotonic generation, per-invariant source
ledger|deep|unledgered, missing {count, sample}), and one readiness
authority (assessProviderHealth) derives the verdict. Unledgered families
are UNKNOWN — never healthy, never broken; a report that throws is a loud
not-ready, never a shrug. Reads at the four index choke points refuse with
the typed NotReady errors, narrated once per (provider, generation) — a
read NEVER starts a store walk:
- the first-read lazy build retires (open builds instead, regardless of
size — the ≥10k deferral and the "lazy loading on first query" branch go;
disableAutoRebuild is re-meant honestly in its docs);
- the verify*Live read-path rebuild triggers retire (refuse-or-serve);
- the read-time consistency probe that could launch a dark rebuild from an
ordinary find() retires;
- repairIndex({ rebuild: ['metadata'|'graph'|'vector'] | 'all' }) is the
one explicit door: rebuilds the named leg unconditionally and reports
rebuilt per family; bare repairIndex() stays report-driven.
test(lifecycle): the biography lane — a store's whole life, refereed
tests/lifecycle/: an independent shadow model referees every read after
every chapter (founding, a working day, clean restart, crash, repair,
second life). Chapters 1-3 green. Chapters 4-6 assert the true contract and
are marked .fails as a release-blocking finding (the kill-matrix
convention): after a crash + adopt reopen the metadata index computes its
'catchup' watermark verdict and nothing consumes it — find() serves the
pre-crash index while canonical and counts recover. The catchup wiring is
the cure; a passing .fails will force the marker's removal. The lane runs
in the integration gate (config + coverage guard).
A downstream deployment reported find({where}) returning a silent [] on a
freshly-opened brain (a native metadata provider that reports data but hasn't
loaded its field postings), blanking filtered pages after every restart. Brainy
had a cold-read guard for GRAPH reads (verifyGraphAdjacencyLive → self-heal or a
loud GraphIndexNotReadyError) but no equivalent for metadata `where`.
Add verifyMetadataLive() — the field-index counterpart, one-shot per brain on the
first filtered find(): probe a known persisted entity's plain field value; if the
index serves it, live (the only cost on a warm brain — one O(1) probe). If not,
the postings didn't load: rebuild from canonical + re-probe; if still unserved,
throw the new exported MetadataIndexNotReadyError rather than let a silent [] pass.
Inconclusive cases (empty store, no plain field, shared-store foreign entity,
migrating provider) resolve to live — never a false rebuild.
The 8.0 open-core JS index already cold-loads correctly (verified: cold where 3/3,
cold related 2/2) — this guards the NATIVE path, where the durable cold-load cure
is cortex-side (same shape as the graph 2.7.8 cure). 4 unit tests (warm no-rebuild,
self-heal, loud-fail, no-filter-no-probe). Gates: typecheck 0, build 0, test:unit
1757/1757.
