Both Engine A gates report SKIPPED, NOT PASSED on main — 20 GB of cache restored and no ontology reachable #732

Observed while adopting claw's reusable id-label gate (#731). Not caused by that PR — it is already happening on main, and this is a record of the evidence.

What the runs show

From the most recent successful label-correspondence run on main (run 33454082017):

Cache hit for restore-key: oaklib-Linux-2026-08
Cache restored from key:   oaklib-Linux-2026-08
...
unreachable ontologies: CHEBI, CL, ENVO, GO, NCBITaxon, UBERON
  oaklib directory: /home/runner/.data/oaklib
  5 entries, 20.29 GB
    CL           no .db or .db.gz present
⚠️  SKIPPED, NOT PASSED: this check could not look anything up (#708).

The cache hit, restored 20.29 GB across 5 entries, and the validator still could not reach a single ontology. So both Engine A gates — validate-terms-taxa and validate-terms-all — are currently reporting SKIPPED rather than validating anything.

The #708 guard is the only reason this is visible instead of a green tick. Without it these two steps would look like passing gates.

Why it is worth its own issue

#716 asks that the validator skip only the unreachable ontology rather than everything, which is about granularity once something is unreachable. This is the prior question: why is nothing reachable when 20 GB of cache was just restored?

Two candidates, and I have not distinguished them:

• the cached entries are not the files the validator looks for (a path or naming mismatch between what is cached and what oaklib expects at ~/.data/oaklib), or
• the download that would populate them produces nothing — every run logs Downloading chebi.db.gz: 0.00B [00:00, ?B/s], which is 0 bytes transferred, so whatever is in those 5 entries did not come from a successful fetch of these six ontologies.

The second reading fits the evidence better: a 20 GB cache that contains no .db for any of the six named ontologies suggests it is caching something else entirely.

Consequence

validate-terms-all is the gate that "has no waiver — fixing the term is the only remedy", and #277 enabled it after the residuals were cleared. It is presently enforcing nothing. validate-products (Engine B) is unaffected and still runs.

Not addressed by #731

That PR preserves both steps through claw's extra-enforce-recipes (culturebotai-claw#303) precisely so they are not lost in consolidation. It keeps the current behaviour exactly, including this skip. Fixing the skip is separate work and belongs here.