The remote run proved the instrumentation did not work. Timing landed —
"chunk 1/1 was killed after 2006ms" — but the in-flight-file naming produced
nothing and fell through to the pre-existing generic message. The feature I
wrote to diagnose a kill was itself destroyed by the kill.
Root cause, confirmed rather than assumed. The reporter yielded strings, which
node pipes into the --test-reporter-destination WriteStream. That stream
BUFFERS. execFileSync's timeout sends SIGKILL, which is uncatchable and gives
nothing a chance to flush, so the events sat in a buffer that died with the
child. The parent's own timer reported correctly because it lives in the
parent — which is exactly why half the feature looked fine.
The reporter now writes each event with fs.appendFileSync, unbuffered and
durable at the moment it happens, to a path passed through
GSD_RUN_TESTS_EVENTS_FILE. Env vars do not count toward the Windows
32,767-char argv ceiling, so moving the path out of argv also REDUCES
FIXED_OVERHEAD; the accounting moved with it rather than being left stale. The
destination is now a fixed devNull sink that stays empty by design.
Silence was the reason this was invisible for a whole run. Failing to read the
events file now says so explicitly, and distinguishes a file that could not be
read at all from one that exists but is empty — the generic fallback firing
quietly is what let a broken feature look like a working one. A write is
unbuffered but not atomic, so a kill can still interleave a partial line; the
reader tolerates exactly one unparsable trailing line and reports the complete
ones before it.
The failing T1 was left red and untouched rather than weakened to pass. Three
new unit tests cover the reader directly, with no subprocess, so the parsing
half is verifiable without a full runner pass: missing file, existing-but-empty
file, and a truncated final line.
Also adds ndjson-reporter.cjs to GSD_SCRIPTS_LIB_FILES in bin/install.js —
scripts/lib/ ships, and omitting it meant the file would install everywhere and
orphan on uninstall. That single omission caused 4 of the 7 remote failures.
Verification runs on the remote runner.
Refs #4012
0abd137ec7