Follow-up: finish merge reliability hardening after PR #46

[adamziel]

PR #46 is the current merge-reliability hardening milestone. It adds broad WordPress semantic coverage, plugin validator infrastructure, crash/branch-birth/ID-band regressions, stale-audit revalidation, filesystem hardening, release preflight fixes, and documentation.

This issue tracks the remaining work needed before we can describe ForkPress merging as fully and completely reliable across real-world WordPress/plugin workloads.

Follow-up checklist

• Add validators for real plugins with known cross-table, serialized, JSON, and file graphs. Keep validators side-effect free; add plugin-owned merge drivers only when the plugin can prove a deterministic repair is safe.
• Build broader external kill harnesses for public Git push/serve entry points. PR [codex] Harden merge reliability gates and semantic coverage #46 now covers one representative smart-HTTP Git-created branch-list crash with a fresh server restart; remaining checkpoints should repeat that product-level shape and prove the branch is either pre-merge, fully merged, or blocked with durable recovery artifacts.
• Add platform-specific crash coverage around APFS sparsebundle detach/compact and rollback-artifact cleanup.
• Expand explicit-ID/import handling beyond currently covered AUTOINCREMENT row insert/rewrite and known WordPress reference cases.
• Add classifiers for plugin/custom logical identities that are not safely bandable, including more non-AUTOINCREMENT INTEGER PRIMARY KEY plugin patterns.
• Add richer plugin/schema stale-audit evidence and guarded resolution flows where a validator or schema planner can prove the reviewed choice is still valid.
• Improve deterministic schema dependency planning for safe view/trigger reorderings while keeping cyclic or semantically ambiguous cases review-only.
• Keep aarch64 macOS release artifacts green before treating Apple Silicon artifacts as trustworthy.
• Keep APFS sparsebundle E2E green as a release gate for macOS merge behavior.

Current evidence from PR #46

• docs/merge-reliability.md maps the nine reliability objectives to tests/docs and explicit remaining gaps.
• docs/plugin-merge-validators.md documents the plugin validator contract.
• docs/merge-crash-consistency.md maps covered crash boundaries, including the representative actual Git-push crash path, and the remaining external kill harness work.
• docs/stale-audit-workflow.md documents the revalidation model and remaining plugin/schema evidence gaps.
• docs/merge-repair-policy.md documents when semantic repairs must remain review-only.
• tests/cow/merge.php, tests/cow/e2e.sh, and tests/cow/git_server.php contain the focused regression coverage added by the milestone.

Related: #46

[adamziel]

Follow-up progress from PR #46 branch: added commit 10bdb6c with a focused regression for source-added dependent view ordering. The test proves a view chain whose lexical order is unsafe still merges automatically and records source-applied decisions instead of review-only schema conflicts. Local verification: php -l tests/cow/merge.php, umask 022; php tests/cow/merge.php (2897 assertions), and git diff --check.

[adamziel]

Follow-up progress from PR #46 branch: added commit 8de4078 with a validator regression for explicit-ID plugin imports. The fixture holds an out-of-band plugin AUTOINCREMENT parent under ID-band rules, lets the no-FK plugin child graph stage, and verifies an automatically discovered plugin validator records the incoherent child->missing-parent graph as a plugin-scoped conflict. Local verification: php -l tests/cow/merge.php, umask 022; php tests/cow/merge.php (2905 assertions), and git diff --check.

[adamziel]

Added one representative product-level Git push crash regression in PR #46. Commit 610174e extends tests/cow/e2e.sh to create a branch through an actual smart-HTTP push, force the server to exit after Git-created branch-list publication, restart ForkPress fresh, verify the branch is visible with DB/file merge-base artifacts and matching Git ref, then merge it into main. The broader follow-up remains: cover the remaining Git push failpoints plus APFS/cleanup checkpoints.

[adamziel]

Added another small plugin-semantics hardening slice in PR #46. Commit 3e3fbf7 tightens the plugin validator contract so valid cannot include findings and conflicts cannot be empty. Contradictory validator output now fails instead of producing ambiguous review evidence. Verified locally with php -l scripts/cow/merge.php, php -l tests/cow/merge.php, git diff --check, and umask 022; php tests/cow/merge.php passing 2907 assertions.