Comments in library/ and internal/ that quoted a person, attributed a decision to one, used first person,
named fleet agents or carried private host names now state the same technical fact in neutral words:
poster-render (including the comments it writes into generated posters), packet-render, the poster and
research scripts, PosterWall, DataTable, the legends, the layouts and the gates. The network-policy note
states the policy itself. Behaviour is unchanged: a few printed gate messages and reason labels drop an
agent name, the poster-render integrity pin follows its comment-only edit, and series.json changes only in
its _meta and _why notes. The historical poster design snapshots (library/scripts/posters/snapshots/),
which nothing reads, are removed.
Ten agents read today's branch (five finders, one skeptic per area who had to confirm each finding
against the current code); 21 distinct defects survived. All are fixed here.
Generator and its proof
- generateCountrySheet fed only ADM0, so a country beside India or China printed without their
provinces (Nepal: 251 KB against Node's 921 KB). It loads the full boundary set, as the driver does.
- check:poster-browser-equiv rebuilt its own feed, so it could not see that. It now calls what the
browser calls (makeZoneSheet, generateCountrySheet — Nepal), deletes the target before the Node run,
runs Node with a clean environment, and FAILS (not "not measured") when the Node generator breaks.
Proven two-sided: it fails with the ADM1 fix reverted.
- The facts table's country list sorted in the reader's browser locale; pinned to en-US (Node's
default, so Node's output still hashes to the baseline).
- zone-sheet-print.js imports the library relatively, so bun, Node and the bundler resolve it alike.
Print seams and wiring
- The wall's Poster Map button used its own stored-file fetch and never the generated sheet, so every
country poster 404'd on the published tree; it now prints the generated sheet first.
- Country Posters wall: card stocks passed (its Card Deck could never print), iso3-names passed (zh/ar
page 1 kept English names), the stored fallback reads previews/ (where the tree serves them).
- Card-stock labels render at render time, so a locale change relabels them.
- The records provider caches by language AND list, and does not keep a failed membership load.
- The UPG-100 legend's Card Deck returns quietly on a parent row instead of an evaluator error; the
selection fetch uses PRINT_FIELDS.
Packet
- The centered-set caption counts what is DRAWN (a ring too full to separate reports its remainder).
- Each ring's number lane is sized to its own radius (ring 1 put a dot under its badge).
- Per-box line keeps a decimal below 10 people ("≈ 0" for small lists); worksheet rows name the country;
the localized poster kicker is fitted against the poster's real 19px, not 22.
Plurals and gates
- regions.countryCount / regionCount were authored in English zero|one|other order in de, es, fr, hi, it
and pt, so CLDR picked "27 Land", "1 países". Rewritten in each locale's own order; check:plural-forms
now fails a string in English order (proven on the old German string).
- check:optional-t-equivalence (gates:post) crashed on the new plural fallback's imports; it injects the
real cldrChoiceIndex and asserts the plural path (ru 21/3/5, en 0/1/7).
- check:packets-all and check-packet-render counted people as cards only, so every lightweight packet
read as "a packet of nobody"; worksheet rows count, and the browser gate checks the grid's top fill
(the renamed .lc-frame) instead of the retired scatter. check:packet-variants now reads the grid itself
— 5,200 boxes, Jesus' 1,716 from the top, the % shading from the top — proven: it fails on a renderer
that shades the last boxes.
gates:pre 68/68, check:optional-t-equivalence PASS, both bundles build.
gates:pre's check:packet-offline writes the four fixture packets into the
same directory this gate reads, so after gates:pre that directory is never
empty. A tree that had generated no zone then failed here on all 28 zones,
and gates:post was red on every landing for nothing anyone could fix.
Fixtures exercise the renderer, not a zone. With only fixtures present the
coverage assertion now says it did not run, and the per-packet checks still
run on the fixtures. One zone packet present and all 28 are required, as
before: planted with laos alone, it fails on the other 27.
The legend offers 28 zones; every place that turned a picked id back
into a zone spread clusters.json's three geographic buckets, which is
27. The missing one is Deaf, whose two deaf lists the legend collapses
into a single affinity-bloc row. So in the browser, silently:
- the Prayer packet for Deaf returned on "if (!zone) return";
- the Deaf poster titled itself by its slug;
- a selection containing Deaf dropped it in .filter(Boolean);
- the packet count read 27 while 28 packets exist, and that count
prints on page 1 and at the tip of page 2's triangle.
The packet fetch also lacked rop1, the field the Deaf selector reads,
so even a found Deaf zone would have resolved to nobody.
The fix is one enumeration. legend-tree.js now exports DEAF_SELECTOR
(the unified row's selector, which exists nowhere in clusters.json) and
zonesWithSelectors(clusters): the legend's leaves with their selectors
attached. The plugin's printableZones() keeps the 27 catalogue objects
exactly as they were and adds only what the catalogue lacks, so the
packet, poster, selection and count all see the same 28. rop1 joins
both packet fetches.
The three hand-typed copies of the Deaf literal (the map, the poster
generator, the offline packet generator) now import the one
definition; the offline generator's own id-to-selector table is
replaced by zonesWithSelectors. The copies left are frozen snapshots and
proof scripts, which keep independent literals on purpose.
The offline sweep gate's coverage had the same 27: it never required a
Deaf packet. It now counts through the legend.
Verified: the live API carries exactly 123 A017 rows, matching the
legend's Deaf count; the default 3x4 posters for sudan, kerala, deaf
and west-africa are byte-identical before and after.
The funnel page vanished from all 28 packets during the group-set work
and nothing failed: funnelPage omits when its data is null, and the
builder supplying that data returns null on any internal error. The two
silences compose into a page that simply is not there.
It was caught by a probe looking for the tip's "1 of 28" text, which is
luck rather than method. Asserting presence per zone makes the two cases
distinguishable: "every packet lost one page" shows as 28 failures in
one column, while "this packet has no data for it" would show as one.
28 of 28 now report map, funnel, groups and sets with no failures.
The gate delegated everything to the browser check, which is exit 75 --
NOT MEASURED -- on every seat but one. So on most machines it proved
nothing about coverage, and earlier today exactly one zone of 28 was
printable with no gate saying so.
The headless half needs no DOM: coverage is a file listing against
clusters.json, the map is markup in the first sheet, and a group count
is a substring count. Per zone it asserts a packet exists, page 1
actually carries the lifted map (an <img or <svg -- the exact thing that
was missing when all 28 printed a blank page 1), and the group count is
above zero, then prints the full 28-row table so a green run still shows
what it measured. The browser half keeps the rendered layer.
Mutation-tested both ways, and the first map mutant was WRONG rather
than the check: stripping <img> tags left laos green because the lifted
poster is one inline <svg> -- the check knew the file better than the
mutant did. A precise mutant (replacing the svg inside the first sheet)
fails naming the zone, and a deleted packet fails coverage by name.
Landing 48's browser guard made check-packet-render refuse to launch outside the
browser slot and exit 75. This gate read `ok = res.status === 0` -- two outcomes,
not three -- so it reported "5 packet(s) FAILED, 0 passed" about five packets it
had never opened, naming five innocent files. Someone would have gone looking for
a rendering bug that does not exist.
run-parallel.mjs:262 states the contract: 75 (EX_TEMPFAIL) means the gate COULD
NOT LOOK, which is neither a pass nor a failure. Unmeasured packets now print ⊘
and are excluded from the pass/fail count, with the count of them in the summary.
AND THE CASE THAT MATTERS MORE: zero failures and zero looks are the same
`failed.length === 0`. Without a guard, a run that could not open a single packet
prints "PASS -- every generated packet renders" -- the most flattering possible
lie about a measurement nobody took, and the same shape as the stale-artifact bug
this file was fixed for earlier today. When nothing was measured it now exits 75
itself, naming the command that runs it in the slot, so the runner buckets the
whole gate NOT MEASURED rather than green.
Verified: outside the slot the gate now exits 75 and says so, instead of exiting
1 with five false failures.
Two defects, both found by the done-card sweep rather than by looking for them.
1. A STALE ARTIFACT WAS GRADED AS A DEFECT, which is this gate's own recorded bug
recurring. BUG-PACKET-SWEEP-GRADED-AN-ACCIDENTAL-SET-OF-GITIGNORED-ARTIFACTS is
marked DONE, but the card was closed without the mechanism changing: the gate
still readdirSync'd every .html with no freshness test. It went red again on 43
packets left from a run three days earlier -- reporting "0 prayer tick boxes"
about files generated before tick boxes existed, so they could not have had
them.
The directory is gitignored (.gitignore:94), so nothing in it reaches main or
another agent; it is one developer's scratch. The gate already knew an EMPTY
directory is not a failure ("a clean checkout has none"); a directory of
LEFTOVERS is the same fact wearing different clothes. A packet older than the
renderer that produces it is now SKIPPED, loudly, with the command to
regenerate it. The renderer's mtime is the reference because that is what
decides the shape a packet should have -- comparing against "today" would
re-fail every morning.
2. THE UNCONDITIONAL --expect-funnel STOPPED BEING TRUE. The comment above it says
every packet comes from packet.mjs "which always passes FUNNEL". That held
until SERIES landed: a country packet DROPS the funnel page deliberately,
because the funnel narrows every people group on earth down to THIS UPG-100
list, which is not a description of a country. So the gate failed a correct
packet.
The expectation now follows the series that produced the packet, identified by
the series' own NETWORKS text surviving into the artifact, and read from
series.json rather than hardcoded -- adding a series with funnel:false must not
require editing this gate. A packet whose series cannot be determined keeps the
strict expectation, because the safe default for "I do not know" is the
stricter check.
Verified: PACKETS-ALL PASS with 43 stale skipped and the country packet accepted;
and a POISON TEST inside the tree (a upg100 packet with its funnel-title removed)
is still caught -- so the relaxation discriminates rather than passing everything.
The first poison attempt ran outside the checkout and failed on a missing strings
catalogue, proving nothing; re-run in place.
internal/ is the build owner's under rule 5B -- source sha to studio, not landed
here.
Three defects in one report, all of them the kind that makes a number read as verified when it is not.
1. THE DENOMINATOR CAME FROM A DIFFERENT POPULATION THAN THE NUMERATOR. It counted
out/posters/*.html — POSTER files — while the numerator counts PACKET zones, and the two are not
the same set: 28 posters against 27 packet-able zones, because `deaf` had a poster and no
obtainable packet (fixed in 3ef164c0). So "2 of 28" was not 26 to go, it was 25 to go plus one
that no command could produce. Both sides now read the SAME seam — leafZones(buildLegendNodes(...)),
which is what the generator itself enumerates — so they cannot drift apart again.
2. out/posters IS ITSELF GENERATED, so on a clean checkout the denominator was null and the
shortfall warning silently vanished. The one line whose job was to stop an overclaim could not
fire precisely when nothing had been rendered at all. Its absence is now stated out loud.
3. THE COUNT AND THE LIST DISAGREED ON SIGHT — my own bug, caught by reading the output rather than
trusting it: "21 zone(s)" printed above a list of 26. zones[] holds every FILE stem, which
includes things that are not zones (the four fixture-* packets and the <zone>.frontier ?list=
variant), so it overcounted coverage against a real-zone denominator and made "7 of 28" out of
2 real zones — a 3.5x overstatement. Count and list are now one derived set, and the non-zone
packets are reported separately as what they are: coverage of the RENDERER, not of a zone's data
shape.
And the warning now NAMES the missing zones instead of counting them. "26 zone(s) have no packet"
tells a reader the size of the hole and not what to type, which is why nobody ever closed it; the
named list is what surfaced `deaf` as unreachable rather than merely ungenerated.
Coverage now measured at 22 of 28, every one PASSing with --expect-funnel, up from 2 of 28. The six
still open are named in the output (central-africa, deaf, east-africa, europe,
southern-africa-islands, west-africa) and all six need a records source carrying the selector fields
3ef164c0 added to the query.
THE HALF I OWED. check-packet-render gained --expect-funnel last commit so a
packet with no funnel page can fail — but nothing passed the flag, and I said so
to regions-plugin while advising them not to reuse the pattern as though
declarable meant covered: "I have traded an invisible defect for a visible
obligation, which is better but not the same as fixed." This is the obligation.
check-packets-all now passes --expect-funnel for every packet it sweeps.
WHY IT CAN BE UNCONDITIONAL. Every packet in out/ is produced by
library/scripts/posters/packet.mjs, which always passes FUNNEL to buildPacket. So
a packet there without page 2 was either generated before the funnel existed or
by a caller that dropped the argument, and this sweep should say both out loud.
Verified across all 16 packets in out/ — the 4 fixtures, the Arabic tibet, and
all 11 laos locales, which I regenerated for this: 95 groups, 9 sheets each (was
8), 95 photos, page 2 present in every one. So the requirement matches a property
the pipeline actually holds rather than one it aspires to.
THE ESCAPE HATCH IS DELIBERATELY AWKWARD: PACKETS_ALL_NO_FUNNEL=1, which prints a
warning. A legitimate funnel-less host is a real state and deserves to be
recordable, but it must be a decision someone takes rather than a default that
quietly tolerates a missing page.
Verified: node --check clean; the arg construction exercised both ways (flag
present by default, absent under the env var). All 16 packets satisfy the sheet
arithmetic with 0 failures. Hindi laos re-checked as the longest-label locale —
5 rows, 5 bars, 0 Devanagari digits, longest label 51 chars so the wrap slack is
not even consumed.
NOT re-run end to end: check-packets-all spawns check-packet-render per packet,
which launches Chromium, and the Playwright policy reserves browsers to rega.
That is also how I learned this wrapper starts browsers — I ran it earlier
without realising and reported it.
"PACKETS-ALL: PASS — every generated packet renders, in every locale present"
is true and reads like "every packet is fine". It counts FILES. Only the zones
someone generated are ever in that directory.
MEASURED 2026-09-24: 11 packets, all of them the SAME zone (laos) in 11
locales, against 28 poster zones in out/posters. The suite proved one zone's
layout eleven times and had never rendered the other 27 -- any of which can
carry a different data shape: fewer groups, a missing photo, a map that does
not resolve. The packet gate itself is strong; the claim about its reach was
not.
It now prints "zones covered : N of M" with the zone names, and names the
shortfall. Running it today reports 2 of 28.
NOT a failure, deliberately. Generating 28 zones x 11 locales means a network
fetch per zone and ~100MB of artefacts; checking only what exists is a real
trade. The problem was never the cap, it was that the cap was silent -- a
summary line that overclaims is how a green board stops meaning anything. The
PASS text now ends with what it does NOT cover, and points at packet:ci, which
builds a second zone from a committed fixture with no network.
check-packet-render's own header states the law it exists for — "never print a number
without asserting on it" — and two of the nine numbers it printed were decoration.
PAGE SIZE. Printed "612 x 792 pt", never compared. The landscape check only catches
h <= w, so a wrong PORTRAIT size sailed through: A4 is 595x842, taller-than-wide like
Letter, and would have passed on a packet printing with wrong margins on every US
printer. Not hypothetical — @page{size:...} silently falls back in Chromium, which this
repo has already paid for once. Now asserts every page's MediaBox against Letter.
CARD COUNT. `if (!r.cards)` passed a packet carrying ONE card. Counts must stay relative
(a per-zone packet has its own group count), but relative does not mean unasserted:
sheets === 1 + ceil(cards/PER_PAGE) + 2 holds for any zone.
★ That was not enough, and the mutation test is what showed it. Deleting a whole list
sheet removed 15 cards AND one sheet, so the invariant still held — 80 cards / 7 sheets
is valid arithmetic — and the packet PASSED while missing 15 people groups. Internal
consistency is not completeness. So it now cross-checks an INDEPENDENT witness: the
{from}-{to} of {count} header the renderer prints on each list page, where count comes
from groups.length and does not move when a page is lost. It also requires the ranges to
TILE [1..count], which catches a missing MIDDLE page that the totals alone cannot see.
Those headers are TRANSLATED and the languages disagree on order — en/ar read "1-20 of
95" while hi reads "95 में से 1–20" and zh "95 之中的 1–20", total FIRST. A positional
regex would read those backwards. Parsed as digits with max() as the total instead, and
locale digit forms normalised to ASCII, so it is grammar-independent. Verified by
running the missing-middle-page mutation in Hindi as well as English.
MARK 5 WAS ASSERTED BY AN ENGLISH WORD. body.includes('Gadarenes') would go RED on a
correctly-translated packet, and passes today only because every locale falls back to
English for that key — the check and the bug were locked together. The renderer now
emits class="p4-passage"/"p4-credit" as test hooks (the block is styled inline and had
no selector at all), and the gate asserts length >= 1200, which holds in any language.
check:packets-all runs the gate over EVERY generated packet rather than one hand-named
file. The single-file gate SKIPs without an argument, so it was in package.json, passing
in all 11 locales, and in NEITHER gates:pre NOR gates:post — it ran only when someone
typed a filename. Now in gates:post (21/21, 11 packets through a real browser). SKIPs
when no packets are generated, so a clean checkout is unaffected.
Mutation-tested: A4 FAILs, a dropped sheet FAILs, a missing middle page FAILs in en and
hi, a truncated passage FAILs, a removed passage FAILs. i18n verified end to end by
adding a PARTIAL new language as a data block only — 3 of 23 keys — and confirming the
translated strings render, untranslated keys fall back to English, and nothing is blank.
