2026-08-27 - The harvest became a command, and writing it twice found a bug
D352's 911 constants came from a throwaway script that existed
nowhere afterwards, failing the standard docs/REFERENCES.md
sets: "anyone should be able to fetch the same material and follow
the same reasoning to the same table."
orbistoun-gen constants <checkout> --revision <commit>
(D353). Not a new shape - orbistoun-gen is already one
module per generated table. The source path becomes an argument, which
mattered within the hour: the script hardcoded
<clones>/freebsd-src, and everything moved under
OOPS/ shortly after.
The bug
The command found 911 where the script found
903. Eight definitions with comments running onto the
next line - the script's regex needed the comment to close on the same
line, so it rejected the whole definition rather than the comment.
AT_EACCESS = 0x0100 and IP_MULTICAST_IF = 9
were simply missing, with nothing saying so.
A harvest that silently drops what it cannot parse produces a table that looks complete, and no one can tell a constant absent because it does not exist from one absent because the extractor tripped. Found only because two implementations disagreed.
Then the fix had the same shape one level down: those eight comments
end mid-sentence, and AT_EACCESS read as "Check access
using effective user" - a fragment shaped like a sentence. They end
in ... now.
Kept
Writing a generator twice and diffing the output is cheap and found something nothing else would have. Worth doing wherever a table is harvested rather than derived.