Verified independently. The branch is based on 8335b12 while main is at bec87f9, so I merged locally first and tested the MERGED tree, not the branch — a clean auto-merge is not a working merge.
Merged tree checks:
- `bash -n` exit 0 on both scripts, under /bin/bash 3.2.57 and env bash 5.3.9.
- Suite exit 0, 0 lines matching `^FAIL:`, 255 bytes of output. 60 test functions defined, 60 invoked, and no defined-but-never-invoked orphan (checked with a comm against the invocation list, not by comparing two counts — two equal counts can both be wrong).
- My own comment fix from bec87f9 survived the merge and is still at :317.
I ran two mutations the worker did not, per "mutate the half the worker did not":
(A) The one that matters, because it is the defect this ticket exists to prevent: collapsed the `unknown` state into `complete`, so "cannot tell" reports as a pass. Result exit 1, one FAIL: `cannot-tell fixture must set REDEPLOY_DRAIN_STATE=unknown: expected unknown, got complete`. So the third state is genuinely load-bearing, not decoration.
(B) Broke the positive check: changed `find_drain_complete_line`'s pattern from `drain complete: released=` to `drain finished: released=`, one site. Result exit 1, one FAIL: `find_drain_complete_line did not capture the present line`.
Proof that (B) applied, against a pristine copy: the full grep line 1 -> 0, the mutant form 0 -> 1, and the bare phrase 2 -> 1 with the comment occurrence untouched. Both files restored byte-identical; `git diff --quiet` clean; green control re-run.
A note on my own proof cell for (B), because it was wrong the first time. I wrote the counts with escaped double quotes inside an already double-quoted command substitution, so the shell split the pattern on spaces and grep treated the words as filenames. It printed "2 and 2" alongside `ugrep: No such file or directory` warnings — a symmetric, plausible-looking pair that meant nothing. The kill itself was never in doubt, since the suite named the exact function, but the cell that was supposed to prove the mutation applied proved nothing. Re-done with single quotes. This is the same trap already written down for this repo, hit by me, in a cell whose only purpose was to guard against exactly this.
One thing I checked that no test covers: the main flow's `HAD_OLD_PID=0; [ -n "$OLD_PID" ] && HAD_OLD_PID=1` runs under `set -euo pipefail`, and on a cold start the test fails. Sourcing stops before the main flow, so no behavioural test reaches that line. If `set -e` fired there, every cold start would abort before the health checks. It does not: `set -e` exempts the left side of an `&&` list, confirmed by running it under both shells — `survived, HAD_OLD_PID=0` on 3.2.57 and on 5.3.9. Safe, but it is untested main-flow wiring, which is the same class as #528's item 1 and belongs on that list.
On the `n/a` fourth state, which the worker flagged for a reviewer's judgment rather than quietly keeping: accepted, and it is in scope. The ticket asked for a third state because a sentinel conflating "no" with "cannot tell" hides two causes needing opposite handling. "The question does not apply" is a third such cause, not a variant of "cannot tell". Without it, the new warning would fire on every clean cold start, and a warning that cries wolf on the most common path trains the operator to skip it — which destroys the absence signal just as surely as putting the completion line in a `finally` would. The worker also proved the gate is actually consulted, using a cold-start fixture whose content deliberately looks like a died drain, so the test would fail if the gate were skipped. That is the right way to test a gate.
Both remaining outcomes are correctly excluded from the "no ERROR lines since restart" summary: only `complete` and `n/a` let it print.
ltms
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