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skip is published as pass, so green does not mean "ran"

The defect

tools/twatch.py:587:

now = {job_key(j): ("pass" if j["status"] == "skip" else j["status"]) ...}

A job skipped because its corpus tree is absent on this box is published as pass. The run-time warning is loud — !! CORPUS MISSING — 33 job(s) will SKIP — but the published state is silently green, and every consumer of tstate/*.json (cross-host comparison, --status, the dashboard, the cutover decision) reads it as covered.

The comment's reasoning is sound as far as it goes: mapping skip to pass closes an open regression when a box legitimately cannot run a job. The defect is that it does so by destroying the distinction, rather than by treating a third state as non-gating.

Why it matters

Green must mean "ran and passed". Concretely:

Shape of the fix

  1. Publish skip as its own status in tstate/<host>.json.
  2. Keep it non-gating: new_red / still_red must not fire on it, and a job that goes red → skip still closes the open regression (today's behaviour).
  3. Migration: existing borg.json / xeon.json carry pass for jobs that were skips. Readers must tolerate a missing/unknown status, so the safe order is (a) teach every reader the third state, (b) start writing it.
  4. Report the per-host skip count in the tstate summary and the dashboard, so the coverage gap is visible without diffing two json files.

Gate

tools/testmgr.py --tier quick green, plus a devtest over diff_jobs covering: skip is not new-red; red → skip closes the regression; skip → red opens one.

Stale — the fix landed 2026-08-08 and the ticket was never moved

25c539758 fix(T): publish 'skip' as its own status — green must mean "ran and passed" (tools/twatch.py, tools/twatch_web.py, tools/devtest_skip_semantics.py). Checked against this ticket's own four-point shape at 2026-08-13:

  1. Published as itself — diff_jobs keeps the literal status: now = {job_key(j): j["status"] ...}, with the laundering conditional gone.
  2. Non-gating — PASSLIKE = ("pass", "skip") is now the single shared definition; new_red / still_red test membership in it, so a skip opens nothing, and red -> skip still closes an open regression.
  3. Migration in the safe order — the code comment records it explicitly: readers (reg_open, gone_keys, the status and index summaries) were taught the third state before anything wrote it, so states carrying pass for former skips stay readable and merely under-report coverage until the host publishes again.
  4. Visible count — tstate: coverage — N job(s) SKIPPED on <host> in the summary, silent when a host skips nothing, plus the dashboard half in twatch_web.py.

Gate as specified: devtest_skip_semantics.py covers skip-is-not-new-red, red -> skip closes, skip -> red opens. Still green today (it also grew three cases for [[bug-t-testmgr-pin-force-kills-its-own-parent]]'s sibling fix to reg_open).

Closed as done. Worth noting the known residual the fix left standing, since it is not recorded anywhere else: a CASCADE entry whose jobs only ever SKIP still closes wrongly, because skip is pass-like for closing. Publishing skip as its own status did not change that, and reg_open's docstring says so.

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