wait_for_peers reads the connected-peer count through a pipeline ending in
`|| echo 0`, so a container that never answers contributes 0. That is safe
against a floor of 1 or more, where 0 reads as "not converged yet" and the wait
eventually times out, and it is unsafe against a floor of 0, where the first
read from a dead container satisfies the wait and the caller proceeds as though
convergence had been observed.
No caller passes 0 today; every one passes 1 or more, and the single variable
minimum is advisory. Rather than harden the reader, reject the input: a floor
below 1 is now an error. That makes the shape unreachable instead of repairing
instances of it, and it costs a future caller nothing except a clear message
saying that asserting "exactly zero peers" needs a reader that distinguishes no
answer from zero, which this floor is not.
wait_for_links goes with it. It had no caller anywhere in the tree on any
branch, and it carried the identical fallback, so the only thing it could do was
hand the hazard to whoever called it first. An uncalled helper cannot be wrong
today, which is exactly why it was the risk worth removing rather than the one
worth keeping for symmetry.
The hermetic gate suite gains a case covering both directions, with docker
stubbed so it stays container-free: a floor of 0 is refused with a message
naming why, and the same unreachable container with a floor of 1 still polls its
full budget and times out. Verified by removing the guard and confirming exactly
the three zero-floor assertions red while both floor-of-one controls stay green.
wait_until_connected decides whether every static suite proceeds or
gives up, so a regression in it turns those suites' verdicts into noise.
Its unit tests existed and were invoked by nothing.
Wire them into ci-local.sh beside the parity and log-string checks,
above the mode branches so --only and --test-only are gated too, and add
the matching step to the ci-parity job in ci.yml. Putting them in one
runner only would create exactly the drift check-ci-parity.sh exists to
catch, and neither placement is visible to that checker since this is not
a matrix suite.
Verified by breaking what it guards rather than by observing green:
setting wait_until_connected's default near-converged slack to 0 fails
case4, records FAIL wait-converge, and exits the sweep 1. Restored after.
They pass, which nothing had established before — 13 assertions, all
green. They also take about 45 seconds rather than the "a few seconds"
the header claimed, and nothing had contradicted that claim because no
runner had ever invoked it. Header corrected with the measurement.
The orphan sweep this called for is done and there are now no
zero-reference *-test.sh files under testing/. It also settles a
disagreement recorded between the audit and the task file: ecn-ab-test.sh
is invoked by nothing, its one reference being a README description
rather than a driver, so the audit was right and the earlier sweep wrong
to call it a documented manual tool. interop-test.sh does have a driver
in interop-stress.sh and iperf-test.sh one in iperf-compare-refs.sh, so
those two were correctly classified.
wait_until_connected fail-fasted on stall even when the mesh was all but
converged, abandoning the run with budget still unspent because one hard
pair straggled to come up. On the rekey-outbound-only topology this turned a
rare deep-node timing straggle (stacked discovery backoff + late bloom
propagation, which clears well inside the budget) into a false baseline RED.
Add a near_converged_slack threshold (default 2): when the number of
still-failing pairs is at or below the slack and the stall window elapses,
keep polling toward max_secs instead of bailing. A mesh genuinely far from
convergence still fast-bails on stall, and a never-converging pair still
hits the hard cap, so a real regression is never masked.
Add a self-contained behavioral test (wait-converge-test.sh) covering the
four contract cases: near-converged hold (with a slack=0 contrast that
proves the slack is what saves the run), far-from-converged fast-bail,
never-converging hard cap, and four-argument backward compatibility.
Johnathan Corgan