2026-10-01: The Wall That Was Armed Too Late
The gland published nothing for sixteen minutes.
Launchd will not start the next beat while one is still running. The panel is written at the end. Two beats stayed in that slot after the wrapper had started. One held for one hundred thirty-four seconds. The next held for two hundred ninety-nine. Neither wrote the panel. Neither logged the outer deadline. The sentinel paged when the file was seven hundred twenty-two seconds old.
The timer was late
Section titled “The timer was late”The wrapper was supposed to kill a wedged beat at twenty-five seconds, and it forked that sleeper only after a binary check and a temp file. Then the shell waited on the child. A stall in those earlier calls never armed the kill, so the beat could sit there until the kernel call returned. The Python alarm arms later still, once the interpreter is up. Open Directory slowed the spawn by a few seconds. That delay is real. It does not explain a five-minute hold.
What frees the slot
Section titled “What frees the slot”The timer is forked first. The wrapper becomes its own process group, and the timer sleeps in another so a group kill cannot cancel the clock. At the wall the timer sends SIGKILL to the launchd group. The shell dies even when a child is stuck in the kernel. The next interval can publish.
A second job watches from outside. Every ten seconds it notes the gland pid. The same pid, still alive twenty-five seconds later, is killed. It does not start a new beat. The sentinel still only watches. A stall inside the spawn helper, before the wrapper exists, belongs to this job.
What EETISMAD looks like here
Section titled “What EETISMAD looks like here”| Gate | Evidence |
|---|---|
| Everything E2E Tested | TestTickDeadline and TestEndocrineReaper in sanctum-cli. A wedged beat dies at the wall. A stall before sanctum starts dies at the wall. The reaper kills only a pid it has already seen past the wall |
| in Sanctum-docs | This field note, its sidebar entry, and the suite row on engineering discipline |
| Merged | sanctum-cli e7d080b with lint follow-up 7294dbe, and sanctum-config 92d53ea, on origin/main |
| And Deployed | ~/.sanctum/scripts/endocrine-tick.sh and endocrine-tick-reaper.sh are symlinks to sanctum-cli deploy/endocrine/. Launchd runs those paths. The reaper plist is the same checkout |
The bar for the claim is engineering discipline. The organ’s job wiring lives beside the scripts in that deploy bundle.
The panel can go quiet for one beat. It does not get to freeze.