# External evidence integrity check — 2026-07-29

## Decision

`EXTERNAL_EVIDENCE_WORKSPACE_NOT_REPRODUCIBLE`

This is a host-only integrity record. No PS5, network, transfer, target build,
installation, execution, result reception, autoload, or device write was used.
Every authorization remains false and automatic retry remains false.

## Findings

The standalone tracked-input suite passes, but the currently available sibling
workspace cannot reproduce every historical cross-repository validator:

- Phase-0.9B and Phase-0.9C source digests do not match several committed
  blobs at the commits named by their historical manifests;
- the expected historical bytes are not present in any local commit of the
  affected sibling repositories;
- Phase-1.0L and Phase-1.0M require ignored sibling audit documents that are
  absent from the current RetroArch checkout;
- Phase-1.0P and Phase-1.0R bind older RetroArch revisions and Phase-1.0R also
  requires ignored Phase-1.0M ELF/map evidence that is absent;
- a single sibling worktree cannot simultaneously represent all historical
  revisions.

Worktree CRLF conversion is a separate source of false mismatches on Windows.
The historical validators and their checksum inventories are immutable and
were not rewritten. A future source-evidence contract should bind committed
Git blobs or explicitly normalized text, but that change must use a new schema
and record rather than altering the historical evidence package. Comparison
against committed blobs confirmed that several remaining mismatches are
genuine evidence-availability failures, not line-ending conversion.

## Test boundary

The default CTest suite uses tracked files only. Historical validators needing
sibling repositories, upstream trees, or ignored artifacts are registered only
with `CHIMERA_GFX_REGISTER_EXTERNAL_EVIDENCE_VALIDATORS=ON` and must be run one
at a time against the exact phase-specific workspace described in
`TEST_PLAN.md`.

Unregistered does not mean passed. Missing or mismatched external evidence
remains fail-closed and cannot support a compatibility, hardware-safety,
execution, cleanup, or recovery claim. The historical records are preserved;
their missing bytes are not reconstructed or replaced by current source.

## Recovery requirement

To re-establish a historical external validation, supply the original exact
ignored evidence and source bytes, verify their SHA-256 values independently,
and bind them to a clean phase-specific checkout. If those bytes cannot be
recovered, the affected source-binding claim remains unavailable permanently;
no manifest hash may be rewritten merely to make a validator pass.