The clean provenance bill was an artifact. Checks 7 and 8 assume `Research doc:`
names a source index whose H2s are slugs, but 30 of 121 corpus entries point at
topic content documents whose H2s are topics. Those 30 produced every new check-7
INFO — all false positives. Check 8 aimed at the same documents, which carry no
`Status:` line at all, would have emitted a large false-FAIL flood; the only thing
preventing it was an unannounced `rd_status != extracted` skip. So "0 new FAILs"
rested on exactly the fail-open class this branch exists to remove, and naively
fixing the skip would have turned the branch red.
Checks 7/8 now run only when the research doc's basename is `sources.md`, and every
other case emits a visible INFO naming the slug. The dangling-path INFO stays ahead
of the basename gate, because a path that does not resolve is rot whatever it is
named. `parse_status` accepts the bullet form and a trailing note after the
backticked value, so a status it cannot read no longer reads as "nothing to check".
Corpus: 36 INFOs of which 30 were false, to 56 of which none are. FAIL stays 0, and
no Status line flipped to `extracted` under the new parser, so no FAIL was
suppressed by luck.
Also closed, each a silent pass: a nonexistent directory, a directory with no
SKILL.md, and extra arguments now exit 2; a UTF-8 BOM no longer defeats frontmatter
parsing; the bare `except Exception: return False` that turned an unreadable file
into a clean pass is gone, with all reads pinned to UTF-8; check 3 walks nested
`references/` subdirectories; `FILL IN:` at end of line no longer escapes checks 1
and 6; duplicate `## slug` blocks and repeated `Research doc:` lines are announced
rather than half-read.
The agent-audit copy carried all of the above unfixed and is now ported, minus the
four fixes that are genuinely N/A at agent scope — it reads a plugin-root
`sources.md` and has no checks 7/8 and no `references/` tree. Its silent exit 0 for
a file outside plugin scope is preserved deliberately: that is a verdict about a
valid file, not a skip, and `check-scope-walkup-sync.sh` pins it. Every exit-2 gate
therefore decides from the argument alone, before the walk-up runs.
`validation-scripts.md` said flatly that silence from the validator is a pass, not
a skip. That sentence is what made a typo'd path dangerous, and both copies are
corrected here. The matching SKILL.md exit-code guidance lands with the audit
rubric change, which touches the same files.
Tests: skill-audit 45 to 65, agent-audit 24 to 43, every new case proven by mutation.
Refs: #111, #118, #121
parse_contributing_files documented that callers depend on None vs [], because a
parse failure returning [] would silently disable the check. Only check 8
honoured it; checks 4/5 (skill-audit) and 3/4 (agent-audit) used a truthiness
test, so an unreadable block disabled them without a word.
Two live corpus entries were skipping this way. A sweep of all 32 sources.md
found 134 entries, exactly 2 parsing to None, both in gitea-files: one heading
carried an inline parenthetical that defeated both regexes, and one (none) was
written without its leading bullet. Also pins EMPTY_SOURCE_KEYS_RE to the two
indents parse_source_keys actually reads.
agent-audit had no INFO tier at all, so it gains one rather than reporting a
check that could not run as a FAIL.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01EJJrm5YmacbwMdzZpXcoti
484357a taught the Contributing parser the bullet form, but a block it still
could not parse returned the same empty result as an explicit "(none)", so the
checker read "no contributing files" and skipped check 8 rather than reporting
that it could not tell. Checks 7 and 8 were consequently dead across the whole
git plugin without anything failing.
The parser now distinguishes "declared none" from "could not parse", which
wakes both checks. Because the parser is duplicated between the skill-audit and
agent-audit copies, it is fenced with BEGIN/END markers and a test hashes the
two regions so the copies cannot drift apart again silently.
Addresses #111.
validate-provenance.sh matched Contributing files only as a single inline
line beginning "- **Contributing files:**". Seven skills write it as a
bare "**Contributing files:**" heading above a bullet list, so
parse_contributing_files returned None and checks 4 (contributing file
exists) and 5 (bidirectional source_keys) silently verified nothing on
git-branches, git-remotes, git-submodules, git-workflow, git-worktrees,
gitea-files and gitea-releases.
Those are among the skills this branch changed most — git-branches alone
gained five reference files — and the retrofit's mandatory sources.md
collateral went in unchecked. Demonstrated rather than argued: planting a
nonexistent contributing path in git-remotes yields 0 findings under the
old parser and 1 FAIL under the new one.
Both forms are now accepted. The bullet form is parsed per bullet rather
than by splitting a joined value, because its per-file notes contain
commas that would otherwise be read as path separators. The return type
becomes a list of note-stripped paths, with "(none)" as an empty list and
an absent entry as None, so the two callers no longer re-split a string.
Applied to agent-audit's copy as well. No agent ships a sources.md today,
so it is latent there, but it is the same defect.
This is a third gate blind spot alongside #117 and #118, and was unfiled.
One real defect surfaced immediately and is fixed separately.
Refs #99
Add validate-provenance.sh and validate-provenance.bats to enforce the
sources provenance chain introduced by skill-author. Eight checks cover
slug cross-references, Contributing files existence, bidirectional
source_keys linkage, Research doc: field presence, and upstream research
doc alignment (forward INFO, reverse FAIL). Adds a new Provenance report
dimension and INFO finding level (observational, exit-0, counted
separately as · P info in the result block).
Closes#8
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
