Rendered from docs/process/obligations/0202-a-bare-none-footprint-is-claimed-as-a-literal-path-so-two-disjoint-issues-collide.md in the Headwater corpus. Every document on this half of the site is typed by the taxonomy the descriptor names: corpus.json.

A bare none footprint is claimed as a literal path, so two disjoint issues collide

Context

hw-adjudicate.md documents FOOTPRINT: <path list> or none as the literal expected value for a change with no derived artifact. tools/run/run-dir.sh claim reads that reported footprint and claims it with <dir>/claims/artifacts/<artifact>, with no case for the word none. Run 20260922-1121 hit this directly: issue #828 (sort/comm collation pins) claimed footprint none first. Issue #847's own footprint (also the bare word none, though its real files are tools/repo/retire-worktree.sh and siblings) came back HELD: none by #828 / WAITS-ON: 828, serializing two pieces of work that share no file.

Obligation

No two issues that both report no derived artifact should collide with each other in the claim store. The bare word none is a sentinel meaning "nothing to claim," not a path. Treating it as one artificially serializes unrelated narrow-footprint work every time it recurs. tools/run/run-dir-fixtures.sh has no case for two narrow-footprint issues in flight together, so the gap is untested rather than a known and accepted limitation.

Discharge

The fix is in run-dir.sh claim, not in a run's own dispatch. One option is to special-case the literal string none so it is never claimed as a path. The other is to change the contract so a caller with no artifact passes nothing rather than the word none. This run worked around the collision by hand. It re-claimed #847 with an issue-qualified string (none (tools/repo/retire-worktree.sh, tools/repo/retire-worktree-fixtures.sh, DEVELOPING.md)) instead of the bare word. That workaround is not a fix, and it will not recur automatically the next time two narrow-footprint issues land in the same run. Nothing discharges this until run-dir.sh claim and its fixture script both carry the special case.