D067 - The headline number is a frontier, not a sum
Status: decided, on external criticism.
"65 pass, 6 partial, 38 fail, 7 skip" has no denominator and no shape. Worse, it discards the one piece of structure this suite deliberately has: checks depend on capabilities that other checks establish, so a failure near the foundation matters more than one at the top, and summing treats them alike.
It also rewards the wrong work - adding three hundred census entries moves the total and changes nothing about whether a bug would be found.
OBS|frontier reports three numbers: capabilities
established, checks that never ran because a capability they
needed was not, and the deepest wholly-green section. The
middle one is the point: it counts the suite sitting behind the floor,
and it is the number an emulator author can move.
Measured over the capability graph, not section
order. Section order is a reading order;
requires_caps/provides_caps is the real
dependency structure. The green-section number is reported as well
because it is the one a person can point at, but it is a proxy and the
capability counts are the measurement.