Recaling refs while the pin stays put produces exactly the state the
all-or-nothing rule exists to prevent: a profile whose refs describe one
revision and whose source_commit names another. The tool manufactured it
on mariani, where three prose runs it could not rewrite kept
bump_commit refusing while eleven refs had already moved.
Asking for both writes is now atomic. The work happens on a copy, which
is promoted only when the pin follows, and a rebase is refused outright
when something visible beforehand will hold the pin: an annotated ref,
one under a mode key, or a prose run whose tokens cannot be located well
enough to rewrite. Where the block only appears after the write, the
copy is discarded and the profile is named on stderr rather than left
half moved.
mariani is back on its pin and stays at four refs to read, which is
honest: three of them have to be rewritten by hand before anything can
advance.
An empty file list is the one assertion here that ages unwatched. Nothing
can go missing and no ref can drift, so nothing notices when a core that
embedded everything grows a path. virtualjaguar said "No external BIOS
files are required or loaded by this core" while its source had grown
eleven filenames read from the system directory, and only a reading
found it.
fileless_audit looks for the request itself, the system directory ask, in
the sources each profile already cites. Over the 151 fileless profiles it
named eleven, of which two were covered by data_directories, six carried
an exclusion_note, and three had nothing written down at all: craft
writes its world database in that directory, dice stores the answer in a
variable no other file in the tree names, lutro hands it to the Lua game.
Each now says so.
The check settles: declared files, a declared directory, or a written
answer all end it, so what it reports is the set nobody has read yet. A
test holds the corpus at zero.
profile_sync follows content, so a ref that drifted still anchors where
the cited text went. That is drift detection working, and it cannot
answer the only question a MAME romset ref asks: does this line declare
this set. It flagged five refs in one driver file where nineteen were
stale, the fourteen others having been relocatable somewhere plausible.
mame_ref_audit asks the stronger question and found ninety-two across
the four profiles whose upstream still moves: mame 66, mamearcade 18,
mamemess 6, groovymame 2. Each had exactly one declaration to point at.
The frozen generations, mame2009 through mame2016, come out clean, which
is the check saying it finds drift only where drift can happen.
The set name is argument 1 of the machine macro. Matching it anywhere on
the line matches every clone naming it as parent, which is most of a
driver, and comments are stripped first because a declaration can sit
behind one. A set no machine declares is reported as not judgeable, not
wrong: device archives take their DEFINE_DEVICE_TYPE shortname.
Saying those profiles would stay open no matter what was wrong. A dead
forge is a verifiable fact, and a fact can be recorded: upstream_gone
carries why, and the profile stops being an open problem. The refs
describe the last revision anyone could reach, which is all any reader
can ask of them.
The declaration is guarded rather than trusted, because a forge can come
back and a profile that keeps asserting a death nobody rechecks is worse
than one that fails loudly. Declared and unreachable reports as a
recorded fact; declared and answering reports as the contradiction it
is, and the profile has to be read again.
yuzu and suyu carry GitHub's 451. citron carries the loss of
git.citron-emu.org and the squatter now sitting on the .com. Each names
what was probed and when, so the next reader retraces it rather than
repeating it.
--backfill-commits and --realign-prose have always printed what they
would write. --rebase-refs and --bump-commit took the flag and printed
nothing, so the only way to read a plan was to let it happen, and the
recale and the pin had to be done in two full network passes with
--force in between.
Both now plan. The plan runs the production write path over a throwaway
copy rather than a parallel branch, so it cannot drift from the write,
and the planned bump reads the text the recale would have left: a pin
held back by prose the same pass would move is no longer reported as
blocked. One pass does both, recale before bump on each profile.
bump_commit also stopped announcing a rewrite of the pin to the value it
already held. On the corpus that was 126 of 232 announcements, which
buried the 106 profiles that did move.
SHA256SUMS.txt sat beside the artifacts it vouches for, so whoever could
rewrite a release rewrote the list with it. The packs were already
reproducible, which answers corruption and lets a third party rebuild an
archive byte for byte; nothing answered a rewritten release.
The list is now signed with an ed25519 key kept for this alone, and the
public half is allowed_signers at the repository root, so verification
does not go through the release page: ssh-keygen -Y verify against the
committed file, then sha256sum --check. Rehearsed on all three outcomes:
a good signature, a tampered pack caught by the sums, a rewritten list
caught by the signature.
The release steps sign and upload the signature, the README points a
downloader at the procedure, and the reproducibility section says what
each half proves. Rotation keeps retired lines so past releases stay
verifiable. Three tests hold the trust root, the signing step and the
documented principal in agreement.
The pages described workflows, an installer pinning and a CI permission
model that are not the ones in the tree. Corrected: the release process,
the CI table, the resolution chain and its statuses, the hash-mismatch
policy per verification mode, the archive convention, and the romset
recipe store.
The FAQ keeps the project's own reading of the legal question rather
than a version that reaches no conclusion.
Update wiki source files (the single source of truth for the site):
- tools.md: renumber pipeline steps 1-8, add step 6 (pack integrity),
add missing CLI flags for cross_reference.py and refresh_data_dirs.py
- architecture.md: update mermaid diagram with pack integrity step,
fix test file count (5 files, 249 tests)
- testing-guide.md: add test_pack_integrity section, add step 5 to
verification discipline checklist
9 new wiki pages: getting-started, faq, troubleshooting,
advanced-usage, verification-modes, adding-a-platform,
adding-a-scraper, testing-guide, release-process.
Updated architecture.md with mermaid diagrams, tools.md with
full pipeline and target/exporter sections, profiling.md with
missing fields, index.md with glossary and nav links.
Expanded CONTRIBUTING.md from stub to full contributor guide.
Filter .old.yml from load_emulator_profiles, generate_db alias
collection, and generate_readme counts. Fix BizHawk sha1 mode
in tools.md, fix RetroPie path, fix export_truth.py typos.
Abdessamad Derraz