A retired host's open regression never clears

• Type: task (Track T tooling / tstate hygiene)
• Opened: 2026-08-02 by claude@xeon while triaging the T queue.

Symptom

Every reader of tstate — twatch --status, gate.sh check, TSTATE.md — still prints:

tstate: host borg  last b5b50be85d2d GREEN (native, 2026-07-31T17:51:50Z); full through f3d420def527 RED
tstate:   open regression: fpc-bootstrap#src:compiler/compiler.pas bad=b1976742df2c (1 in range)

borg's daemon was stopped on 2026-07-31 when xeon became sole watcher coverage (two-box-protocol.md, "Write scopes"). A regression clears when a later run on that host passes the job. borg will never run again as things stand, so this line is immortal: three days old today, and it will be three months old unchanged.

Why it matters more than it looks

It is not cosmetic — it degrades the signal every agent is told to trust:

• an open regression is the thing agents are supposed to act on, and this one cannot be acted on at all
• it is plausible: fpc-bootstrap on compiler/compiler.pas reads like a live bootstrap break, so each new agent re-investigates it
• it trains readers to skim the "open regression" lines, which is exactly the habit that makes a real one get missed

The fork (pick one — this is a small design call, not obvious)

1. Stale-host suppression in the reader. A host whose newest verdict is older than N days is reported as RETIRED and its open regressions are filed under it rather than mixed into the live list. No data lost, works for any future host that goes quiet (a Pi oracle powered down, a container that stops being enrolled). Most general; a little more code in every reader — route it through states_at() per [[task-t-worktree-is-not-current-state]] rather than each reader re-deriving it.
2. Explicit retirement. trackt retire <host> marks borg.json, readers skip retired hosts. Honest and cheap, but manual — nothing prompts anyone to run it, so the next quiet host repeats this exact ticket.
3. Re-test it on xeon. The regression is against b1976742df2c on a job that xeon also runs; a green there does not clear borg's entry (verdicts are per host, by design — the toolchain gap is the point), so this answers the compiler question without answering the display one.

Recommendation: 1, with the caveat that "retired" must be visible rather than silent — a host disappearing quietly is its own failure mode, and the whole reason --status exists is to notice a watcher that stopped.

Not in scope

Whether borg should watch again. That is the user's call about the fleet, not a tooling decision — if borg re-enrols, it publishes under its own borg.json and this entry resumes meaning something.

Log

• 2026-08-03 (claude@xeon) — option 1 (stale-host suppression in the reader), per the user's call that borg's watcher is undecided/occasional ([[decide-t-queue-scope-2026-08-03]]). That answer is what rules option 2 out: an explicit trackt retire would have to be undone by hand the next time borg runs, and nothing prompts anyone to do either.

  So quietness is read from the clock — last.date older than QUIET_HOST_SECS (2 days) — and it reverses itself the moment the host publishes again. host_quiet_secs() is one helper used by both readers, so --status, trackt status and gate.sh check (which shells out to --status) all agree rather than each re-deriving it, as [[task-t-worktree-is-not-current-state]] asks. It reads last.date, never a file mtime, for the same reason.

  Held, never hidden — the ticket's caveat is the load-bearing part. The host line gains [QUIET 3d2h — not publishing], the entries are replaced by a named count rather than dropped, and TSTATE.md grows a "Held — quiet hosts" section that says why nothing can clear them. A host going quiet is now MORE visible than it was, which is what --status exists for.

  Verified against live tstate: borg shows QUIET 3d2h with its one entry held, xeon's live state is untouched, and tstate: UP still answers the question the command is read for. tools/twatch_quiet_host_devtest.py pins the threshold, the never-ran case (being enrolled is not being abandoned), the live-host-beside-a-quiet-one case, and the reversal.

• 2026-08-03 — resolved, commit 3baa61f7e.