Tie each module's registry pin to its submodule pin, and catch rewinds

[M3gA-Mind]

Summary

• Nine subsystems load as downloaded cdylib modules, each pinned twice and independently — as a git submodule (the contract this repo compiles against) and as a version + per-platform SHA-256 in modules/registry.rs (the artifact loaded at runtime). Nothing compared them.
• Adds two gates, not one. They catch different mechanisms, and the second is the one that catches what has actually bitten.
• Coverage: 7 module crates / 9 records for gate 1, all 16 submodules for gate 2. Neither enumerates a fixed list — crate 17 fails the gate until it is accounted for.
• Fail-closed on every path that cannot complete. 21 tests, run by the existing Scripts Self-Tests lane.

Problem

A pin bump on either side alone produces a build that compiles clean, passes every lane, and then loses a capability at runtime on a user's machine. That is #5598 (capability bitmask 8191 vs 262143), #5623 (learning scheduler failing 260x, missing ListAllFacets), #5641 (memory driver missing the profile family). All three closed by bumping a pin; none left behind anything that would catch the fourth.

The module ABI gate cannot catch it: it checks magic, ABI revision, pointer width, target triple, endianness, feature bits and panic strategy — none of which encodes which release the artifact is. A correctly built older artifact is admitted without complaint.

registry.rs's own nine tests are thorough about internal consistency and say nothing about the source tree. every_asset_name_carries_the_pinned_version states the goal exactly: "The digests and the version have to describe one release." One release — not one source commit.

Why two gates and not one

This is the part worth reading, because the obvious single gate is not sufficient.

The obvious gate — and the one #5727 suggests — is an equality check: for each record, does registry.rs's version match vendor/<crate>'s tag? That is gate 1, and it is worth having.

It would not have caught the most recent regression.

$ git show --stat 14a23b994 | grep vendor/
 vendor/tinyagents  | 2 +-
 vendor/tinymemory  | 2 +-

$ git -C vendor/tinyagents merge-base --is-ancestor bbcd0a6 e0f3210 && echo "backwards"
backwards

14a23b994 ("Pin v1.10.0 and route memory-source sync through the driver") moved vendor/tinyagents from e0f3210 — tinyagents#122, 2026-08-25 — back to bbcd0a6 — #121, 2026-08-22. Eight commits backwards. It silently removed a shipped fix from the product, and nobody noticed until #5796 restored it. #5725 did the identical eight-commit rewind, undone by #5787.

Two things make the equality gate blind to this:

1. That commit was internally consistent. It adopted a coordinated pin set. Every pin agreed with every other pin — they agreed on an older release. An equality check asks "do these two match?", and the answer was yes.
2. tinyagents has no registry record at all. It is not in ALL; it has no version, no digest, no artifact. It is a compile-time dependency with exactly one pin, so "do the two pins agree?" has nothing to compare. Gate 1 cannot look at it even in principle.

So the second gate asks a different question — not do the pins agree, but did a pin move backwards — and it asks it of all sixteen submodules rather than the seven that are also modules. It fails on both 14a23b994 and 77fddf591 (#5725) today; there is a test for the first.

A backwards move is not always wrong: reverting a bad bump is a backwards move and is exactly right. It just has to be deliberate, so it is declared with [pin-rewind] in the PR title or a commit message on the branch.

Neither gate uses gh. Both read gitlinks with git directly, so they cannot be defeated by gh pr view --json files silently capping at 100 files — which is how the #5725 gitlink went unreviewed in the first place.

What gate 1 covers

Five pin sites move together, and they are not uniform — sites 3-5 exist only for tinymemory, which is the one module pinned in more than two places:

#	Site	Scope
1	the vendor/<name> gitlink	all 7 module crates
2	modules/registry.rs version + digests	9 records
3	ARTIFACT_CAPABILITIES_PIN (modules/memory.rs)	tinymemory only
4/5	memory_version / memory_sha256 in ci-full.yml, ci-lite.yml, e2e-reusable.yml	tinymemory only — note e2e-reusable.yml carries two blocks, so four occurrences over three files

Changing one character of the tinymemory version raises ten findings across all five sites. The tinymemory checks are keyed off the record rather than a literal, so re-pinning tinymemory needs no edit to the gate.

The exemptions file

Two records are drifted today: tinymcp is 15 commits past v0.3.1 and tinywallet is 8 past v0.5.0. A hard-failing gate would land red on arrival, so scripts/ci/module-pin-exemptions.json declares them with reasons — the issue's suggested direction (2), so a record that deliberately does not track its submodule says so rather than being indistinguishable from drift.

What stops it becoming a dumping ground:

• expect pins the exact git describe output. An exempt record cannot drift further without failing — widening the drift is a deliberate edit to this file, which is a reviewable diff.
• A stale exemption fails. If the pins are reconciled and the entry is left behind, the gate fails and tells you to delete it. A stale exemption is not harmless: it is a standing licence for the next real drift on that record to pass unnoticed.
• An exemption for a record that is no longer in ALL fails.
• Every entry needs id, expect and reason, or the gate fails.

Both behaviours are tested (an exemption whose drift has been fixed fails, so it cannot linger, a declared exemption passes only for the exact drift it declares).

Reconciling the two drifted records is separate work — for tinywallet there is currently no newer tag to re-pin to.

Coverage, and what happens when crate 17 lands

Gate 1 covers the 7 module crates behind the 9 records in ALL; gate 2 covers all 16 submodules, enumerated from the tree rather than from a list.

A guard that silently ignores a new crate is the same failure class it is meant to prevent, so gate 1 does not enumerate modules — it requires every record in ALL to be accounted for in PIN_MAP, and fails otherwise:

✗ modules::registry::ALL contains "tinyfuture", which scripts/ci/check-module-pins.mjs
  does not know about.
    Add it to PIN_MAP: either name the vendor/ submodule that is the source of
    truth for its version, or set submodule: null with a reason (and sharesWith,
    if it ships out of another crate's release).
    This is deliberate: a new module must not inherit an unchecked pin.

The reverse also fails: a PIN_MAP entry for a record that has been removed. Six vendored crates landed between 2026-08-20 and 2026-08-27 (tinymcp, tinyjuice, tinybox, tinyruntime, tinydocs, tinyvoice), so a guard listing the modules of the day would already be behind. Gate 2 needs no equivalent, because it reads the gitlinks out of the tree.

tinyruntime-nodejs and tinyruntime-python have no repository of their own — they ship out of the tinyruntime release — so they are declared submodule: null with sharesWith: vendor/tinyruntime and checked against it.

Fail-closed evidence

Two CI gates here have swallowed a git error and reported clean having scanned nothing, so every path that cannot complete exits non-zero:

Condition	Behaviour
submodule not checked out	fail — "not a checked-out submodule … run it in a lane with submodules: recursive". Never skipped.
registry file missing	fail — "expected file is missing"
registry unparseable (no ALL, zero records)	fail — throws rather than returning an empty set
exemptions file absent or invalid JSON	fail
base ref unresolvable	fail — "Refusing to pass having compared nothing"
a commit missing from a submodule's object store	fetch it; if still absent, fail — "does not guess: a pin whose direction cannot be established is treated as unverified, not as forward"
merge-base --is-ancestor exits other than 0/1	fail — treated as unverified
zero submodules in HEAD, or zero workflow memory_version blocks	fail — "this gate scanned nothing"
any uncaught throw	fail with a legible message, via a top-level handler — never a stack trace, never exit 0
[pin-rewind] present	waives a declared rewind only; never waives an unverifiable pin

Four tests assert this directly against broken fixtures — an unparseable registry, a missing registry, a registry whose vendor/ tree is absent, and the monotonicity gate run outside a git repo. Each asserts both a non-zero exit and that the success banner is absent, which matters: see the revert check below.

The job itself is deliberately not filtered on changes — a skipped job counts as a pass in PR CI Gate, and a path filter would have to watch registry.rs, modules/memory.rs, three workflows and sixteen gitlinks. It is a few seconds of pure Node.

Revert checks

Every guard was reverted and the failure confirmed to name my assertion, not an incidental one.

1. Drop the stale-exemption branch (treat any exemption as a pass) → exactly one test fails:

✖ an exemption whose drift has been fixed fails, so it cannot linger
  AssertionError: Expected values to be strictly equal: true !== false
      at scripts/__tests__/module-pins.test.mjs:120:10

Line 120 is assert.equal(v.ok, false).

2. Make PIN_MAP coverage permissive → exactly one test fails: a record the pin map has never heard of fails.

3. Make a missing submodule skip instead of fail — the classic fail-open → records with no checked-out submodule fail the gate instead of being skipped fails at module-pins.test.mjs:271:

AssertionError: The input did not match the regular expression
/not a checked-out submodule|submodules: recursive/

That third one is worth calling out. The exit code stayed non-zero by coincidence (a null describe reads as drift downstream), so the status assertion alone would have missed the fail-open. The message assertion is what caught it. Both are needed, and both are in every fail-closed test.

Impact

CI only. No product code changes, no vendor/ gitlink moves, no Cargo manifest touched. One new job (~10 min timeout, mostly the recursive submodule checkout) wired into PR CI Gate.

The scripts path filter now also watches scripts/lib/** and this gate's own files. It did not before, so a change to the checking logic would have skipped the lane that tests it — the gate would have stopped watching itself.

Related

• Closes No check ties a module's registry pin to its submodule pin — the drift that caused #5598, #5623 and #5641 is still unguarded (and tinymcp is drifted now) #5727
• Would have caught: 14a23b994 (restored by chore(vendor): bring tinyagents, tinyflows, tinyplace and tinywallet current #5796) and Route the recall, reset and flush paths through the contract #5725 (undone by fix(vendor): restore the tinyagents pin that #5725 carried backwards #5787). Both fail gate 2 today.
• Prior art for the shape: check-feature-forwarding.mjs, cited in the issue — the feature-forwarding pair is machine-checked precisely because a silent divergence once shipped voice missing to 56 users.
• Not addressed here: is_compatible has zero call sites, so a member inside an already-advertised capability family that the pinned artifact does not serve still fails at runtime with UnknownMethod rather than at build. A pin can satisfy both gates and still be wrong that way. It needs the pinned tag's METHODS list, which is a different question and a different mechanism — worth its own issue rather than folding in here.
• Follow-up: reconcile the two declared exemptions. tinywallet has no newer tag to re-pin to today.

Submission Checklist

• Tests added or updated (happy path + at least one failure / edge case) — 21 tests in scripts/__tests__/module-pins.test.mjs, run by the existing Scripts Self-Tests lane. Failure paths: drift, widened exemption, stale exemption, unknown record, removed record, unparseable registry, missing registry, uninitialised submodule, unresolvable base, no git repo, and the real 14a23b994 regression.
• Diff coverage ≥ 80% — the changed lines are two Node CLIs, one pure-logic lib and its tests; the lib is covered directly and both CLIs end-to-end. Rust diff coverage is not applicable (no Rust changed). Not run as diff-cover locally; asserted by the CI gate.
• Coverage matrix updated — N/A: no feature row added, removed or renamed; this adds a CI gate and changes no product behaviour.
• All affected feature IDs from the matrix are listed under ## Related — N/A: no matrix feature IDs affected.
• No new external network dependencies introduced — neither gate uses the network or gh; both read the tree with git alone. Gate 2 fetches a missing commit from the submodule's existing origin only when it must, and fails if it cannot.
• Manual smoke checklist updated if this touches release-cut surfaces — N/A: CI-only change; no release-cut surface touched.
• Linked issue closed via Closes #NNN in the ## Related section — Closes tinyhumansai/openhuman#5727.

---

AI Authored PR Metadata (required for Codex/Linear PRs)

Linear Issue

• Key: N/A
• URL: N/A

Commit & Branch

• Branch: fix/5727-module-pin-drift-gate
• Commit SHA: a44888163

Validation Run

• pnpm --filter openhuman-app format:check — N/A: no file under app/ changed; scripts/ is outside the prettier workspace.
• pnpm typecheck — N/A: no TypeScript changed.
• Focused tests: node --test scripts/__tests__/module-pins.test.mjs — 21 passed, 0 failed. Both gates run clean on the tree (exit 0); gate 2 exits 1 on 14a23b994^..14a23b994 and on #5725's merge.
• Rust fmt/check (if changed) — N/A: no Rust changed. No cargo was run at all.
• Tauri fmt/check (if changed) — N/A: no Tauri shell file changed.
• Workflow validity: ci-lite.yml parsed with PyYAML — 16 jobs, module-pin-gate present with 3 steps, pr-ci-gate.needs includes it, checkout is fetch-depth: 0 + submodules: recursive.

Validation Blocked

• command: N/A — nothing was blocked.
• error: N/A
• impact: N/A

Behavior Changes

• Intended behavior change: none at runtime. A PR that drifts a module pin, or rewinds a vendor/ submodule, now fails CI instead of merging green.
• User-visible effect: none. This is a CI gate.

Parity Contract

• Legacy behavior preserved: no product code is touched. The two records drifted today are declared rather than fixed, so the gate lands green on main as it stands and changes nothing about what is built or shipped.
• Guard/fallback/dispatch parity checks: the gate adds a job and does not modify any existing one except the changes path filter (widened, never narrowed) and the PR CI Gate aggregation (one entry added).

Duplicate / Superseded PR Handling

• Duplicate PR(s): none.
• Canonical PR: this one.
• Resolution: N/A.

Summary by CodeRabbit

• New Features

  • Added automated checks to ensure module registry versions match their pinned submodule releases.
  • Added safeguards against vendor submodule pins moving backward or diverging unexpectedly.
  • Added support for documented exceptions and explicit rewind approvals.

• Bug Fixes

  • CI now fails safely when pin data is missing, malformed, unresolved, or inconsistent.
  • Updated the tinymemory test module pin used for coverage checks.

• Tests

  • Added comprehensive coverage for pin validation, exemptions, submodule history, and failure scenarios.

[M3gA-Mind]

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tinysweeper found nothing blocking. Approving.

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📝 Walkthrough

Walkthrough

The PR adds shared pin classification, module registry validation, submodule movement checks, exemptions, tests, and CI enforcement. The pull-request gate now includes the module pin gate.

Changes

Module pin integrity

Layer / File(s)	Summary
Pin parsing and decision contracts scripts/lib/module-pins.mjs	The shared parser handles comments in the ALL list. New helpers classify pin moves and verify real submodule roots.
Module registry pin gate scripts/ci/check-module-pins.mjs, scripts/ci/module-pin-exemptions.json	The gate validates registry coverage, submodule descriptions, approved exemptions, and tinymemory artifact references.
Submodule monotonicity gate scripts/ci/check-submodule-monotonic.mjs, scripts/lib/module-pins.mjs	The gate detects rewind and divergent vendor/* moves, verifies commit availability, and applies [pin-rewind] handling.
CI gate wiring and self-test activation .github/workflows/ci-lite.yml	The workflow runs both checks with full recursive submodules, updates the tinymemory coverage pin, activates script tests for shared gate changes, and adds the result to pr-ci-gate.
Pin gate validation tests scripts/__tests__/module-pins.test.mjs	Tests cover parsing, classification, CLI failures, temporary repositories, exemptions, and submodule detection.

Estimated code review effort: 4 (Complex) | ~45 minutes

Merge Risk: 🔵 Low · up to d4e31

The PR adds CI checks for module pin consistency and rewinds, but one regression test still validates a local parser copy rather than the production parser, so it could miss a real parsing regression. This is a bounded follow-up risk requiring owner awareness; no merge-blocking issue is otherwise identified.

Sequence Diagram(s)

sequenceDiagram
  participant GitHubActions
  participant ModulePinGate
  participant MonotonicGate
  participant VendorSubmodules
  GitHubActions->>ModulePinGate: Run registry pin validation
  ModulePinGate->>VendorSubmodules: Read git describe --tags HEAD
  VendorSubmodules-->>ModulePinGate: Return release descriptions
  GitHubActions->>MonotonicGate: Run pull-request movement validation
  MonotonicGate->>VendorSubmodules: Compare base and head gitlinks
  VendorSubmodules-->>MonotonicGate: Return commit ancestry
  ModulePinGate-->>GitHubActions: Return pass or failure
  MonotonicGate-->>GitHubActions: Return pass or failure
  GitHubActions->>GitHubActions: Require module-pin-gate in pr-ci-gate

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Suggested reviewers: senamakel

Poem

A rabbit checks each module pin
Tags and submodules must agree
No vendor rewind slips within
The gate records each result clearly
Tests watch the paths with care
CI keeps the pins in pair

🚥 Pre-merge checks | ✅ 5

✅ Passed checks (5 passed)

Check name	Status	Explanation
Docstring Coverage	✅ Passed	Docstring coverage is 84.21% which is sufficient. The required threshold is 80.00%. Docstring coverage is scoped to functions touched by this diff. Analyzed 19 functions across 4 files. (1 skipped: 1 …
Linked Issues check	✅ Passed	Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.
Out of Scope Changes check	✅ Passed	Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.
Description Check	✅ Passed	Check skipped - CodeRabbit’s high-level summary is enabled.
Title check	✅ Passed	The title clearly summarizes the two primary changes: matching registry pins to submodule pins and detecting submodule rewinds.

Full details: Docstring Coverage

Explanation

Docstring coverage is 84.21% which is sufficient. The required threshold is 80.00%. Docstring coverage is scoped to functions touched by this diff. Analyzed 19 functions across 4 files. (1 skipped: 1 unsupported.)

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Inline comments:
In `@scripts/lib/module-pins.mjs`:
- Around line 12-14: Update the ALL-list parsing near the split/map/filter chain
to remove standalone line comments before tokenizing, or otherwise extract
record identifiers directly, so records following // comments are preserved and
remain available to the PIN_MAP coverage check.

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Actionable comments posted: 1

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Inline comments:
In `@scripts/__tests__/module-pins.test.mjs`:
- Around line 315-329: Update the test to import the exported parseAllList from
scripts/lib/module-pins.mjs and call that imported implementation instead of the
file-local helper, ensuring the regression test exercises the production parser.

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[M3gA-Mind]

Rebased onto 871a8963e (#5823). Head is now d4e31c99d.

#5823 is the first independent exercise of both gates in this PR, and worth recording because it moved the exact sites they watch — vendor/tinymemory 4141ec8 → c580953, plus registry.rs, modules/memory.rs and all three workflows, coordinated onto 1.13.2.

Both gates agree with it:

Module pin check OK — 9 record(s) in modules::registry::ALL, all pins accounted for.
Submodule monotonicity check OK — 1 submodule pin(s) moved forward: vendor/tinymemory

The "forward" verdict was cross-checked independently rather than taken from the gate's own answer: git -C vendor/tinymemory merge-base --is-ancestor 4141ec84c c580953ac confirms the old pin is an ancestor of the new one.

And the gate still fires on a partial bump, which is the case it exists for. Dropping any single site back to 1.12.0 while leaving the rest at 1.13.2:

✗ ARTIFACT_CAPABILITIES_PIN and the tinymemory registry record disagree.
✗ .github/workflows/ci-lite.yml: memory_version="1.12.0" but the tinymemory registry record is 1.13.2.

So had #5823 moved four of the five sites, this would have caught it before merge.

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