Operator asked whether the headend clone was fully reconciled. It was not, and running the
gauntlet there -- which had never actually been done -- found a real host-dependent gate defect.

RECONCILE. The headend was 1 commit behind with 0 local commits, now at HEAD, tfstate sha256
byte-identical before and after. No stale remote-tracking refs. One asymmetry found and fixed:
opentofu/vr1-dc1-substrate/.terraform.lock.hcl was UNTRACKED and not gitignored, while dc0's
equivalent IS tracked. Same provider version (0.9.8), so a content divergence was ruled out by
measurement, but a fresh clone could not reproduce dc1's provider resolution the way it can
dc0's. Landed, byte-identical to the headend copy.

THE GATE DEFECT. The gauntlet read ALL GREEN (89) on the jumphost and 1/89 FAILED on the headend,
on opentofu-validate. Cause: `tofu fmt -recursive` walks EVERY .tf/.tfvars under the tree,
including GITIGNORED local files. The sole flagged file was
opentofu/vr1-dc0-substrate/d124-inner.auto.tfvars -- gitignored operator input that exists only
on the host which runs the applies. So the gate was RED ON THE ONLY HOST THAT DEPLOYS and green
where it did not matter, the same host-dependent-verdict class as the LC_ALL manifest sort.
Ruled out first: both hosts run tofu 1.12.4, so this was not version drift.

The fmt check is now scoped to repo content, and a gitignored file is SKIPPED with the reason
printed rather than silently. Proven both ways: a badly-formatted TRACKED file still FAILS (T16),
a gitignored local tfvars is skipped and does not fail (T17). T17 also fails loudly if the ignore
rule ever stops covering per-DC tfvars, so the case cannot silently stop testing what it claims.

Owned: my first T16 read as a failure because `bash "$SCRIPT" | grep -q` inherits the gate's
correct exit 1 under `set -o pipefail`, even though grep matched -- a passing assertion reading as
a failure. Same strict-bash family as the IFS and inherit_errexit traps this repo has hit before.
Captured first, then grepped.

opentofu-validate harness 16/16; repo-lint 0 fail.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01HvCyrwvYTTcDYnRErfMsNf