Refuse a branch inventory that cannot be shown to cover every branch

[BigSimmo]

Summary

Follow-up to #1392 (ledger #109), found in review after that PR merged. Complete history is not complete branch coverage, and the second condition survives the first fix.

git clone --depth 1 implies --single-branch, which pins remote.origin.fetch to the one cloned branch. git fetch --unshallow converts the history — so git rev-parse --is-shallow-repository reads false and shallowCloneRefusal is satisfied — but it does not widen the refspec, and an ordinary git fetch origin respects the narrow one.

Measured in a fixture with main and feature, after unshallowing:

is-shallow: false refspec: +refs/heads/main:refs/remotes/origin/main
remote heads on origin: refs/heads/feature refs/heads/main
sweep --json: { "branches": [] } EXIT=0

An empty inventory is not a safe failure here — it reads as "nothing to clean up". And where origin/main itself is the branch not fetched, every rev-list fails into 0/0, making every branch a deletion candidate with no unique patch content. That is the same hazard as #109, reached by a different route and past the guard written for it.

Fixed in both directions. The sweep's own fetch now passes an explicit +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*, which populates every remote-tracking ref without rewriting the operator's config, so an ordinary run repairs its own coverage. branchCoverageRefusal then refuses when neither the configured refspec nor a completed wildcard fetch establishes coverage — --no-fetch, offline, or a failed fetch. Its remedy is git remote set-branches origin '*', deliberately not--unshallow, which fixes history and does nothing here; sending the operator there means they re-run and get the same empty inventory, now doubly convinced it is right.

Negative refspecs are their own case, and the behaviour is asymmetric. Measured on git 2.43.0 with +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/* plus ^refs/heads/feature:

Fetch	origin/feature
git fetch --prune origin (configured refspec)	absent — exclusion honoured
git fetch --prune origin '+refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*'	restored — command line overrides it

So a ^ spec means the config alone cannot establish coverage, while a completed fetch still can. Reading the wildcard and ignoring the exclusion would report a partial inventory as complete.

Verification

• npm run verify:cheap — Test Files 432 passed (432), Tests 4466 passed | 4 skipped (4470). test is last in that && chain, so the 24 static gates, lint and typecheck all passed ahead of it.
• Narrow-refspec fixture, before → after: the script as merged on main exits 0 with "branches": []; with this change --no-fetch exits 1 carrying the set-branches remedy, and with fetch allowed exits 0 with feature present in the inventory.
• Negative-refspec fixture: --no-fetch refuses with branches: null and exit 1; fetch allowed exits 0 and lists feature.
• Non-regression on this full clone: npm run sweep:branch-ledger -- --no-fetch still prints the normal inventory and exits 0 (remote.origin.fetch is +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/* here, so no refusal).
• 8 new cases in tests/repo-hygiene.test.ts (38 in the file): wildcard / mirror / unprefixed accepted; single-branch, several-narrow, absent config rejected; negative refspec rejected from config but permitted after a completed fetch; the refusal's Fix: line must name set-branches and must not name --unshallow.
• UI verification not run: no UI, routing, styling or browser behaviour changed.
• Retrieval/answer evals not run: no retrieval, ranking, selection or answer-generation change.
• npm run check:production-readiness not run: no clinical workflow, privacy, environment, Supabase, source-governance or deployment change.

One of my own assertions was wrong on the first pass — it required the refusal body not to mention --unshallow at all, when the body mentions it deliberately, as the thing that does not fix a refspec. Narrowed to the Fix: line, which is what actually misdirects an operator.

Risk and rollout

• Risk: low, and in the safe direction — the guard can only stop a report, never produce a wrong one. Two realistic failure modes were checked: refusing on a healthy clone (guarded by the predicate tests plus the live non-regression run above), and the fetch now carrying an explicit refspec. The latter is equivalent to the configured one on a normal clone; on a narrow one it fetches more, which is the point. No config is mutated, and the script remains report-only.
• Rollback: revert this PR. The sweep returns to reporting a partial inventory as complete on a single-branch clone.
• Provider or production effects: None. No provider-backed gate was run; no product code, schema, API or gate behaviour is touched.

Clinical Governance Preflight

Not applicable to this diff. classifyPullRequestFiles reports clinicalRisk: false, operationalRisk: false, ragRanking: false, ui: false for the changed paths — scripts/sweep-branch-ledger.mjs, tests/repo-hygiene.test.ts, docs/branch-cleanup-guide.md, docs/outstanding-issues.md. scripts/** is clinical-risk only when it matches ingest/reindex/migration/governance/production/drift/supabase, and a branch-hygiene reporter matches none of those. No ingestion, answer generation, search/ranking, source rendering, document access, privacy or clinical output behaviour changed.

Notes

RAG impact: no retrieval behaviour change — nothing under src/lib/rag/**, clinical-search, retrieval-selection, released-search-order, ranking-config, answer-ranking, the eval harness, the golden fixture, or the retrieval RPCs is touched.

The branch was restarted from the post-merge main rather than stacked on the merged history, and the remote branch had been auto-deleted on merge, so this is a new branch and a new PR rather than a reopen. Pruning stale refs also showed that two of the five #108 deletion candidates — claude/clinical-kb-pwa-review-asi3wb and claude/dazzling-blackwell-f348d0 — are already gone from the remote; #108 still lists them and needs re-checking against the live remote before its ledger rows are appended.

docs/branch-cleanup-guide.md gains the refspec check alongside the shallow one, because the raw git commands the guide documents have no guard even now that the script does.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

https://claude.ai/code/session_012YRCXgX4AWZ579bKN6sk6b

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📥 Commits

Reviewing files that changed from the base of the PR and between cd2c666 and f6d1f72.

📒 Files selected for processing (5)

• docs/branch-cleanup-guide.md
• docs/branch-review-ledger.md
• docs/outstanding-issues.md
• scripts/sweep-branch-ledger.mjs
• tests/repo-hygiene.test.ts

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[BigSimmo]

@cursoragent Inspect the PR and repository state, identify the root cause of every failing CI check, unresolved review comment, merge conflict, and related defect. Apply the smallest robust fix using existing project patterns and best practices, without unrelated changes. Run Bugbot and all relevant lint, type-check, test, build, and CI-equivalent commands, fix any issues found, then resolve only the review comments that are fully addressed. Summarise the root causes, changes made, validation results, and any remaining blockers.

[cursor]

PR #1398 is unblocked. Hosted PR required is green, both Codex threads are resolved, and merge-tree vs main is clean. Squash/merge auto-merge is enabled.

Root causes

Issue	Cause
CONFLICTING / DIRTY	Real conflict in docs/outstanding-issues.md — main added #115; this PR updated #109
Missing GitHub CI on first tip	pull_request CI never fired until a push (only PR Policy + CircleCI ran)
Codex P2 #1 (resolved by Claude in de594186)	Coverage accepted refspecs by source alone; wrong destination left inventory empty
Codex P2 #2 (fixed here)	+refs/*:refs/remotes/origin/* accepted as covered, but git nests to origin/heads/<branch>
Bugbot	No findings
Failing product CI	None after the conflict sync

Changes made

• Merged main; kept #115 + next-id=116; preserved this PR’s #109 refspec follow-up
• Fixed Codex P2: fetchRefspecCoversAllBranches accepts only refs/heads/* → refs/remotes/origin/*
• Replied + resolved both Codex threads
• Recorded babysit in the review ledger

Validation

• npm run verify:cheap — PASS (432 files, 4469 passed | 4 skipped)
• tests/repo-hygiene.test.ts — 40/40
• Hosted: PR required, Unit coverage, Static PR, Safety, Semgrep, CircleCI — PASS
• Unresolved review threads: 0

Remaining

• GitHub mergeable still briefly UNKNOWN after the last push (checks green, tree merge clean) — auto-merge should proceed once GitHub refreshes

[BigSimmo]

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