Rendered from docs/process/obligations/0173-four-inline-gates-in-the-workflow-decide-an-exit-status-and-no-suite-provokes-one.md in the Headwater corpus. Every document on this half of the site is typed by the taxonomy the descriptor names: corpus.json.

Four inline gates in the workflow decide an exit status and no suite provokes one

Context

.github/workflows/ci.yml holds 40 run: steps over 1022 lines, and five of its lines carry exit 1. Four named steps own them.

• The build wrote nothing into the deployed site
• Every rendered page points at the corpus descriptor
• The two halves of the site compose into one served directory
• The SARIF this corpus emits is SARIF

Each one is a decision procedure written in the workflow, and each one reddens a required check.

Line 376 is the sharpest of them. It runs grep -rL 'rel="describedby"' over .headwater/site-build, filters 404.html out, and exits 1 on a non-empty result. The comment above it explains that || true is required. grep -L exits 1 when it finds nothing, so the success case would otherwise end the job. That reasoning is correct and nothing provokes either arm of it. A build that wrote no HTML at all produces an empty result and the same exit 0.

Thirteen fixture suites ship under tools/, .githooks/ and .claude/. Four of them read ci.yml, measured by a grep -c 'ci\.yml' over each file: tools/engine/build-declaration-fixtures.sh, .claude/skills/fixtures.sh, tools/repo/developing-fixtures.sh and tools/repo/readme-fixtures.sh. Nine read it not at all. Not one of the thirteen drives an inline gate of the workflow over a scratch input.

The two suites that do read ci.yml read it two different ways. tools/engine/build-declaration-fixtures.sh parses every run: value, which is what lets it judge a cargo step written behind a cd or inside a block scalar. .claude/skills/fixtures.sh calls grep -q 'headwater sweep\|sweep report\|sweep plan' over the whole file at lines 674 and 728. A comment naming the verb is a false red there, and a step invoking it through a variable is a false green.

No mechanism in this repository parses or lints a shell script. sh -n appears nowhere, shellcheck runs nowhere, and the one occurrence of the string is a # shellcheck disable=SC2086 directive at tools/engine/engine-readme-fixtures.sh:270 that no linter reads.

Obligation

The gates that hold this repository are held by nothing themselves. A gate that reddens on correct input and a gate that stays green on broken input are one class of defect. The workflow carries four procedures where neither arm is provoked. .claude/skills/fixtures.sh reads the workflow at a grain that cannot separate a comment from a step. That is a second reader of the same file disagreeing with the first.

Discharge

Each inline gate is discharged when a scratch-driven case runs its refusal and asserts the words of it. A second case runs its success arm over an input that must pass. The site gates need a scratch build directory rather than a real mkdocs build, which is what makes them affordable.

The reader half is discharged when every suite that judges ci.yml reads a parsed run: value, the way tools/engine/build-declaration-fixtures.sh already does. A shell parse over every script of this repository, by sh -n or by a linter, is a separate and smaller remedy that no gate carries.