The job summary is the deliverable #83 asked for -- "readable without opening a
log" -- and GitHub exposes no API that reads a job summary back: the check-run
output for the advisory job returns summary: null, so a write that silently did
not happen would be invisible to everything except a human on the run page. The
step log can be read, so it now carries one line saying which of the two
happened, including the case where GITHUB_STEP_SUMMARY is unset entirely, which
is what running the script by hand looks like.
"A comparison was asked for" and "a number was found to compare against" were one
variable, and collapsing them put the report one refactor away from being the
thing #83 filed. The sed that reads FAILS_ON_EMULATOR_API37_BASELINE is anchored
at the line start, so indenting the const into an object -- or renaming it, or
moving it -- empties it, and the old code then skipped the whole comparison while
the table kept printing exactly as before. Silent, and indistinguishable from a
run that matched.
Now an unreadable baseline is itself a deviation, with the notice naming the
const so the fix is obvious. Verified against the real captured log of run
32865281555 three ways: baseline file absent, const indented into an object, and
the committed file unchanged -- the first two announce, the third stays silent.
That job is continue-on-error and red on every PR by design, which CLAUDE.md
states plainly -- and that instruction is exactly why nobody reads it. Nothing in
a red X separates "the known three" from "the known three plus yours".
A bare failure count would not have fixed it, and this is measured rather than
assumed. The run is usually truncated: seven of eight advisory runs read on
2026-08-25 ended in `Test run failed to complete. Expected 3 tests, received 2.`
with INSTRUMENTATION_ABORTED, and one did not. A count taken from a truncated run
misleads in both directions -- a fourth marked test can still yield the same
number if the abort lands earlier, and the known set getting worse can lower it.
The test XML does not rescue it either, which was the thing worth checking before
building on it: it IS written for an aborted run, and it reports a tidy
tests="3" failures="3" for a run the runner had just described as truncated. So
the XML is the authority on how many results landed, the runner's own output is
the only authority on whether the run finished, and the report reads both and
says which number came from where.
The baseline is one number beside the marker, because the marker means "cannot
pass on this image": the count is both how many tests the advisory leg runs and
how many should fail. A smaller failure count is the interesting direction -- it
means one now passes, which is the documented trigger for deleting the
annotation.
Nothing about the job's status changes. It stays continue-on-error, stays red,
stays out of the required contexts; a deviation is a ::notice::, never an
::error::. The report is a separate script so it can be run against a real log
saved from a real CI run, which is how the comparison was shown to fire.
The gating legs get the shape without the comparison: they run the whole suite,
so comparing there would announce a deviation five times a run -- but a truncated
run reporting fewer results than it ran is what #108 looks like, and "completed
cleanly" is the field that would show it.
Closes#83
JMR-dev