joakimp 34cf1e3810 release: v1.8.8, and a notice that named the wrong remedy ...

Freezes the v1.8.8 section and clears the two non-code checklist items
pi@emb-7kj4vr4g handed over (evt_20260826T134919_a614ecfc2d4f), plus the two
carried nits from its round-2 verification (evt_20260826T133356_d56792791a49).
Every claim below was re-measured here rather than taken from the handoff.

THE STALENESS NOTICE ASSERTED A DIRECTION IT NEVER TESTED — Blocker 1's shape,
one layer down, in the message I added to replace the message that named the
wrong cause. The notice fired on "recorded != HEAD" and then announced HEAD as
the newer side without testing ancestry, so a clone that was merely BEHIND got
"has moved to 82a8d3c; the snapshot describes the older 5fd0d5c" when 82a8d3c is
5fd0d5c's ANCESTOR. Found by EMB against the real state of its own host, not a
fabrication. The verdict was never wrong (rc 0, nothing mis-verified) but the
remedy it implies is a ~67-minute base rebuild when the actual fix is `git pull`
— the only one of the two carried nits with a price tag, which is why it went
first. Now tests ancestry with the merge-base --is-ancestor primitive the refresh
path 60 lines below already used, and reports three verdicts: stale (refresh),
clone behind (pull, do NOT refresh), diverged (reconcile). All three verified by
execution; only the first was correct before. --help no longer errors on the one
script whose argument order was itself a landmine. The `-s "$VENDORED"` guard is
now commented as load-bearing: it makes the empty-stdin collision unreachable by
construction, which also means no test below exercises it any more, so deleting
it as "redundant with the probes" would silently restore the false OK.

CHANGELOG: retitled, and three stale spots fixed in what becomes the permanent
record. It cited the skill at 82a8d3c (twice superseded); it RE-ASSERTED the
retracted mailbox measurement as live evidence 200 lines after withdrawing it,
which is the exact non-contradiction failure this release exists to fix; and its
warning block still described the pre-e8ddeaf world ("still records c04cd15",
"now exits 1") while quoting as exemplary the very notice whose direction was
unverified. Per EMB's steer the conclusion was kept and only the evidence
replaced: the status filter does drop broadcast noise, it just never computed
owed-ness. Honest replacement, measured on both machines: raw filter returns 2
here and 1 there, EVERY ONE already answered, derivation returns 0 for both.

SNAPSHOT RESYNCED AGAIN, 5fd0d5c -> 6eb20af, because skillset 6eb20af adds the
limit of my own seq ordering test: seq is REPLICA-LOCAL, equal to origin_seq only
because one replica authors for all four machines, so use hlc once mesh_peers
reports a peer. Recorded as reasoning not measurement — a second replica cannot
be stood up here. The durable half is the asymmetry: seq skew makes an ANSWERED
item resurface (noise, visible, self-correcting) while created_at SUPPRESSES AN
UNANSWERED ask forever (silent, permanent), so the skill now says outright that
"fixing" a resurfacing item with a timestamp trades the safe failure for the
dangerous one. The resync was free: rootfs/ was already changing, so the base
rebuild was forced regardless — the ordering warning about accidental staleness
does not apply to a deliberate refresh before the tag.

--check is a clean OK at 6eb20af with no notice, canary re-verified bidirectionally
(present 3, withdrawn 0), baked snapshot 0644, tree hash recomputed at build time
and re-verified in-container. bash -n clean; shellcheck/hadolint/actionlint remain
absent locally, so CI is still the only evidence for those.

2026-08-26 15:56:03 +02:00

..

local

release: v1.8.8, and a notice that named the wrong remedy

2026-08-26 15:56:03 +02:00