Two gate failures on main, one real and one long-hidden.
THE HEALTH-GATE PIN encoded the old law — "narrates once per generation, twice
across a generation bump" — which the content-keyed dedupe deliberately
replaced. A provider's `generation` bumps on every ledger mutation and every
rebuild boundary, so keying narration on it re-printed an unchanged health line
on every read that consulted a busy provider, and let a provider that never
bumped suppress a line whose reasons had genuinely changed. The pin now asserts
BOTH directions: an unchanged verdict stays silent however the counter moves,
and a changed verdict is always heard.
THE VFS HYBRID-SEARCH SUITE configured its store with `options.basePath`, an
alias removed at the 8.0 major that configures nothing. The suite was therefore
never using its temp directory — it opened the DEFAULT store, shared with every
other run on the machine, and accumulated tens of thousands of rows until it
failed on that shared store's graph adjacency instead of on anything it tests.
It now passes `storage.path`. The suite drops from 6.5s to 0.3s, which is the
measure of how much foreign data it had been opening.
Neither failure was caused by the release branch; the first is the branch's own
behaviour change meeting its outdated pin, the second predates it.
Two cures from the pair's first production adoption, both measured live.
THE READ GATE IS PER-FAMILY. The report-driven gate refused on ANY
provider's not-ready verdict at every read choke point — so a pure
metadata find({ where }) was refused because the VECTOR leg was not
serving, and a deployment's badge reads returned errors for a verdict that
had nothing to do with them. A read may only be refused by the family it
actually consults: metadata reads by the metadata leg (plus graph for a
`connected` filter), vector search by the vector leg, traversal by the
graph leg. Callers name what they need; the existing narration-once-per-
generation and typed-refusal laws are unchanged within a family.
NO RE-EMBED ON UNCHANGED DATA. update() — and its transact() planner —
treated any write that carried `data` as a data change: with
deferEmbedding it queued a landing, and the worker re-embedded and re-landed
a vector for content that had not changed. A host heartbeat re-writing an
unchanged row every few seconds therefore fed a live index-row loop on a
production store. A write carrying the row's current data (structural
compare, key order normalized) is now not a data change: no re-embed, no
deferred landing, no vector rewrite; the metadata write itself still
commits. A real change re-embeds exactly as before.
Pinned in tests/integration/read-gate-scope-and-no-reembed.test.ts — both
pins red-proved against the unfixed code with the production shapes
verbatim. Two health-gate pins that encoded the old brain-global scope are
re-pointed to the family their reads consult.
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).
