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regression CASCADE: 1414 stub tickets auto-filed on 2026-07-18 — all false positives

One incident, recorded once. This replaces 1414 individual auto-filed stub tickets that were rejected and are now deleted; they made up 98% of rejected/ and buried the handful of rejections worth reading.

What happened

The Track T watcher (host borg) auto-filed one ticket per red job across the whole matrix, in a two-hour window:

hour tickets
2026-07-18T18 938
2026-07-18T19 476

Every one carried an empty log tail and no triage — title, repro line, an empty code fence, stub footer. Median size 725 bytes.

By job family

family tickets
test-core 889
test-arm32 120
test-i386 120
test-aarch64 115
test-riscv32 88
test-threads 29
test-asm 15
test-smoke 12
test-c-conformance (all targets) 17
lib-fpc-clean, selfhost-fixedpoint, test-cjson, test-debug-g, test-emit-obj, test-float-determinism, test-lua, test-sqlite-threads-x86_64, test-zlib 1 each

Why they are false positives

The blamed commits cannot have caused a regression:

blamed sha tickets what it actually is
f5c8fbec6016 938 tstate(borg): 2dffbb7c65a2 RED (native) …
f6cad82e8063 476 tstate-ticket(borg): regression-….md …

Both are tstate-only commits — watcher bookkeeping that touches no compiler, library or test source. A commit that changes nothing but tstate/ cannot turn 889 test-core jobs red. The matrix went red for a host/environment reason and the watcher attributed it to whatever sha happened to be at HEAD.

This is the same failure mode as the xeon enrolment cascade, which was triaged in detail and is kept: see regression-cascade-110774a14648.md in this directory — there the two root causes were a stale seeded binary (make seed-from-stable leaving compiler/pascal26 newer than its sources, so nothing rebuilt) and missing host dev packages. Neither was a code regression either.

Recovery

The 1414 stubs are deleted, not archived — they are recoverable from git history at the parent of the deleting commit (155c41505). Nothing in them is unique: each holds a job name, a sha that is not the cause, and an empty log.

Follow-ups already filed

Suppressing this class at the source is Track T's, and tickets exist: task-t-suppress-autoticket-until-host-baselined and task-t-seed-from-stable-defeats-rebuild. The lesson worth keeping is the attribution rule — a tstate-only commit is never a regression suspect, and a whole-matrix red is one event, not N findings.