--- title: Track duplicate-person-rows detection and close the merge-side gate gap type: task status: completed description: >- Tracks the recurring duplicate-person-rows data check in the league database and closes the gap that lets a merge or birth-date repair mint the next round of duplicate shells. base_uri: user:task/league/track-duplicate-person-rows-detection.md created_at: '2026-08-29T18:41:10.209Z' entity_id: 09f1a0e6-8017-46bf-a455-fb7ea25210c0 finished_at: '2026-08-29T20:52:47.908Z' observations: - ████████████████████████████████████████████████ - ████████████████████████████████████████████████ - ████████████████████████████████████████████████ - ████████████████████████████████████████████████ owner_identity_uri: █████████████████████████ priority: Low public_read: true tags: - user:tag/league-xo-football.md updated_at: '2026-08-29T20:52:47.908Z' visibility_analyzed_at: '2026-11-05T23:50:33.018Z' --- ## Context The `duplicate-person-rows` registered check (db/checks/registry.mjs) fired signals 126936 and 127175; round 6 (2026-08-29-dedupe-duplicate-person-rows-round-6.sql, applied) merged the last 11 true duplicates and the check now grades clean (0 unparked findings, 0 stale-parked, 17 parked adjudicated shells). The class recurs by construction -- repairing corrupt sentinel birth dates makes further pairs agree on a date they never agreed on, so each repair can mint the next round's shell. The registry invariant stated the class has "NO detector on any surface -- no audit script, no gate, no monitoring script grades it." That was demonstrably stale: the registered check grades this class (it is what surfaced 126936) and rejects unresolved findings on the `data-check-findings-duplicate-person-rows` fingerprint. ## Plan 1. **Done** (`aba4dadd8`) -- corrected the invariant wording in db/checks/registry.mjs. The false "no detector" claim is replaced with the real gap: `audit_player_row_merges` cannot run after the fact, so the dated-SQL repair path has to carry the losslessness proof in its own steps. 2. **Done, redesigned.** The original item -- wire merge-side parity with the conflated-identity class -- was rejected on validation and replaced with a documented contract in `repair_command`. Two independent grounds: docs/guides/gates.md names db/gates/check-conflated-player-rows.mjs as an anti-pattern (a standing data condition in the cluster gates, deferring every session's push), and a push-time gate cannot audit a merge at all, since the audit compares against per-table counts captured before the write. The gap was also smaller than assumed -- round 6 already carries the proof in-transaction. So `repair_command` now points at round 6 rather than round 5 and names the five steps that constitute the proof, making the shape the contract. 3. **Done.** Watcher retired: channel `league-duplicate-person-row-merge` archived, scratch directory removed. No watcher process was running. 4. **Done.** Measured directly against production 2026-08-29: 17 candidate shells, all 17 parked, 0 unparked, 0 stale-parked, 28,796 player rows. The on-host cron run is the ongoing guard, not a step to trigger. ## The interrupted run's 15 merges, audited The 2026-08-28 `--apply` died after landing 15 of its 26 planned merges, and the payload marked those 15 unverified. They are now verified. The apply log had printed all 26 plans before the process died, so the survivor, donor, before-reference totals and donor birth date were all recoverable, and three of the four `audit_player_row_merges` invariants could be checked retroactively against production: - No surviving fold -- every donor pid is gone from `player` and referenced by none of the 147 pid-carrying tables. - Reference conservation -- every survivor holds at least the sum the two halves held, with the entire excess (1 to 5 rows) accounted for by `player_changelog` growth, which the audit permits. - Birth date -- every survivor carries the donor's real `date_of_birth`, not the `0000-00-00` sentinel. This is the defect the fold exists to unwind, and the one a bad merge produces. Only per-column union-of-values across the full row is unrecoverable, since the log printed reference totals rather than row snapshots. ``` ANGE-CRAI-017031 -> ANGE-CRAI-024657 DEAN-WRIG-015773 -> DEAN-WRIG-015768 BENJ-PITT-009807 -> BENJ-PITT-012623 DEMA-MINT-003764 -> DEMA-MINT-024562 BERN-LAYX-010157 -> BERN-LAYX-016185 DOUG-DATI-020353 -> DOUG-DATI-024609 BLAK-SCHL-019052 -> BLAK-SCHL-007958 GEOR-BUSS-016192 -> GEOR-BUSS-016463 BOBB-FOST-001083 -> BOBB-FOST-024697 JAME-MOND-021265 -> JAME-MOND-021349 CODY-BROW-009350 -> CODY-BROW-019783 JAYX-MOOR-004672 -> JAYX-MOOR-024619 DACO-RODG-008591 -> DACO-RODG-003113 DANX-BAZU-002650 -> DANX-BAZU-024611 DARR-RICH-020084 -> DARR-RICH-024706 ``` ## Out of scope Re-adjudicating parked shells; the 17 parked pairs are adjudicated different people and must stay parked.