F5 gave coord-count.sh a three-status contract (0 counted, 2 usage error,
3 mailbox root absent) so it could SAY the measurement failed instead of
rendering a reassuring value. board.sh threw that signal away: every call
site piped it into awk, and a pipeline reports the LAST stage's status,
so the producer's exit code was discarded at each one. HAVE_COUNT only
ever tested that the sibling FILE exists - a strictly weaker question.
Measured on 0.30.0 with a mailbox root that does not exist: coord-count
printed "not counted, not zero" and exited 3, while --brief answered
"Ingen repo skylder noen et svar i dag." and --plan emitted no advarsel=
key at all. A gate that can fail whose consumer does not listen is a gate
that does not fall.
COUNT_OK is now the measurement's verdict, and COUNT_WHY carries the exact
reason - including the status number - into all five reporting sites. The
two causes stay distinguishable: "the sibling is missing" and "the world
you named is not there" are different repairs. Any nonzero is caught, not
3 specifically, and a partial stdout captured before a failure is
discarded because a half-count also looks measured. --brief's three
separate coord-count invocations collapse to one: with a status to honour,
three runs would mean three statuses to reconcile.
board.sh stays read-only. The table and --plain views still never invoke
coord-count at all, and COUNT_WHY says so rather than claiming a
measurement nobody attempted.
Bounded gap, stated rather than closed: the table's own INN/ORDRE/FLY
columns count with ls and read 0 for every repo when the mailbox root is
absent. Same defect shape, different source - not a coord-count consumer,
so exit 3 cannot reach it, and the order warned by name against silent
widening.
TDD: board-selftest.sh section 27 written first and RED (7 failures)
before board.sh was touched, behind six known-positive controls and a
ground-truth assertion that coord-count really does exit 3 on that input.
Mutation-verified: restoring `if true` in place of the status test turns
exactly those seven red and leaves all six controls green.
Suites under real /bin/bash 3.2: board 314/314 (was 300), coord 242/242,
route 69/69, orders 110/110, guard 54/54.
No version bump: 0.30.0 shipped two days ago, and this adds no flag, no
exit code and no env var - it repairs an existing consumer. Recommend it
rides the next collection rather than minting a release of its own; the
operator decides, and the catalog owns the tag.
Order: 20260826T115026Z-9982513971-from-.claude
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Kjell Tore Guttormsen
4369499e4b