D040 - Checks can be excluded at build time, and the default list is empty

Status: decided.

A conformance probe against a platform under development meets calls that do not merely fail but end the run, and everything behind such a call is lost. Here it was two checks out of seventy-nine, and they cost eight sections including the census - the section whose answer is most useful when everything else has gone red. The first run reached 110 records of 513.

make module EXCLUDE="040-file/open-rejects-null 080-video/flip-rate-rejects-bad-handle"

This is not for making a report look better, and the design says so in three places:

• The default list is empty, so the first run finds the crash. That is the finding.
• An excluded check is reported as a skip with the reason, not omitted. It stays visible in the report.
• Skip ranks below Fail in diff, so excluding a check to bury a failure reads as a regression - which is exactly what it would be.

Both runs are worth keeping and they answer different questions: the first says what takes the process down, the second says what everything else does. Both are in docs/examples/.