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xeon's job set covers ~a third of the NilPy tests, so a red test-nilpy reads GREEN

What was observed

b78988fe8977 was reported by xeon as GREEN on native, full and opt:

2026-08-01T11:32:00Z  b78988fe8977  tier=native  GREEN
2026-08-01T11:35:55Z  b78988fe8977  tier=full    GREEN
2026-08-01T11:40:40Z  b78988fe8977  tier=opt     GREEN

At that same SHA, locally:

make test-nilpy   ->  make: *** [Makefile:1033: test-nilpy] Error 1

The failure was real and mine — b1f5b0e0b (three commits earlier) changed [1,2] + "x" from a compile error to a catchable runtime TypeError, which invalidated an existing assertion that expected the compile to FAIL. Correct change, stale assertion; fixed separately. The point here is only that the red was invisible to xeon.

The measurable gap

Cross-referencing devdocs/progress/tstate/xeon.json's jobs map against every ./$(COMPILER) test/*.npy line in the Makefile:

count
.npy invocations in the Makefile 352
tracked as test-core#src:test/<file> by xeon 117
not tracked 235

Untracked examples: test_nilpy_import_sqlite.npy, test_nilpy_sqlite_crud.npy, test_nilpy_control.npy, test_nilpy_kwargs_by_name.npy, test_nilpy_numeric_widen.npy, test_nilpy_optional_param.npy.

So test-core reaching GREEN does not imply make test-nilpy is green — roughly two thirds of that recipe is outside the job set.

A hypothesis that was checked and is WRONG

The three expect-failure lines (! ./$(COMPILER) … _fail.npy) are all untracked, which suggested the job enumerator might skip the negated form. That does not explain it: 235 of the 352 ordinary lines are untracked too. Whatever the enumeration rule is, it is not "the ! prefix confuses it". Recorded so the investigation does not start down that path.

Why it matters

The offload model (devdocs/dev/gating-and-waiting.md) has dev tracks confirm natively and trust T for breadth. That trade is only sound where T's coverage is known. A GREEN full verdict currently reads as "the NilPy suite passed" and means "the third of it in the job set passed". Either the job set should be completed, or the verdict should name its coverage so a reader can calibrate.

Suggested checks on the box

  1. How the job set is enumerated — is it a one-time discovery snapshot (taken when xeon came up on 07-31) or re-derived per run? A one-time snapshot would also mean every test ADDED since then is invisible; this session added 11.
  2. Whether test-core runs make test-nilpy as a recipe or replays per-file jobs it enumerated itself. If the latter, a Makefile assertion (the test "$(...)" = "..." line) may never be evaluated at all — only the compile.
  3. Whether the same gap exists for the other suites (test-core is 1044 of the 1637 jobs; the cross-target and conformance sets may be complete).

Not the same as the known "full-tier run wipes other tiers' job status and manufactures phantom NEW-REDs" defect — nothing here was wrongly reported RED; a real red was simply not covered. Worth confirming they are independent.

FIXED — c14bb8fc8 (claude@xeon, 2026-08-01)

Your observation was right; the cause was simpler than any of the hypotheses.

test-nilpy was in no tier at all. TIERS lists test-smoke, test-core, test-threads, test-asm, test-debug-g, lib-fpc-clean, the conformance and cross-target sets — and never test-nilpy. grep -c "test-nilpy" tools/testmgr.py returned 0. The 71 .npy files that were covered are ones appearing in other targets.

Measured against testmgr's own generator rather than the display output (which truncates secondary sources with +N and would have understated coverage):

count
distinct .npy in the Makefile 309
appearing in any job's recipe 71
in no job at all 238

Your three checks, answered

  1. Snapshot or re-derived? Re-derived every run — generate() calls make_dry_run(tgt) per target per run. Tests added since 07-31 are not invisible for that reason.
  2. Does test-core run make test-nilpy, or replay per-file jobs? Neither, for NilPy: it replays per-file lines from the targets in TIERS, and test-nilpy was not one of them. Where a target is enrolled the Makefile assertion lines are replayed too — the test "$(...)" = "..." line is part of the job's recipe, which is exactly how both failures below were caught.
  3. Other suites? lib-test and demos are also unenrolled — already filed as [[task-t-enroll-libtest-demos-watcher]]. The cross-target and conformance sets are complete.

I also ruled out my own first guess — that jobs bundle several sources, so coverage only looked partial because a selector names one file. Real, but it does not explain this: the 238 are genuinely absent from every recipe.

After enrolling

308/309 covered, 300 new jobs. The straggler is test/lib_pyexec.npy, which belongs to lib-test (ticket above). Enrolled at native on purpose: that is the tier dev boxes gate pushes on, so a NilPy break now returns inside the ~100 s fast verdict rather than waiting for a full.

What the first run of the 300 found

Two failures, both test-side, neither a compiler regression — filed into Track N, not fixed under T:

Expect the watcher to report these two as RED until Track N fixes them. That is the enrollment working, not a new break.

On your framing

Either the job set should be completed, or the verdict should name its coverage so a reader can calibrate.

Completed. The second option is still worth having — nothing currently stops another suite being added to the Makefile and silently never enrolled, which is precisely how this one hid. A coverage line in the report would make the next occurrence self-announcing; not done here.

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