Refactoring backlog — OPEN items only, grouped by EXECUTION CONTEXT

Lean working document. Every item here is OPEN. Completed/obsolete items and the observation journal live in the archives: …-archive-2026-08-10.md, …-archive-2026-08-27.md, …-archive-2026-08-30.md, …-archive-2026-08-31.md, …-archive-2026-09-02.md, …-archive-2026-09-03.md, …-archive-2026-09-07.md, …-archive-2026-09-09.md, …-archive-2026-09-17.md. This file shows OPEN work only + CHANGELOG.md + memory — do not resurrect without re-verifying.

Legend — effort: S(mall)/M(edium)/L(arge); impact: ★ … ★★★. Prefix glossary (only the prefixes this OPEN file still uses): F#=the size and duplication registers. Image gaps (CON7 onwards) live in the root BACKLOG.md. Everything else is archive-only: CON1–CON6 closed 2026-09-17/18 (the consumer issues, the last one measured and aligned at Flutter 3.47.4), EX closed on 2026-09-07/09 (the extent gates scan linux/llm-stack and froze its rows), VK/AS closed on 2026-09-17, CC/CL/CS/AB/R#/YB/DISK/APP on 2026-09-07, HT/GH before them, QW/TC/SMK in the 2026-09-04 waves, and the rest long before that.

Last groomed: 2026-09-18, after CON4’s Windows half was measured, the dependency wave landed and the two owner questions were answered — every closed narrative moved to …-archive-2026-09-17.md and the CHANGELOG. What stays here is two registers. Every earlier grooming’s warning still applies: re-derive; do not trust a number here, including these.

OPEN

F1. The extent queues — what is left after every row got a verdict [M each]

function-size.allow and code-complexity.allow are the authority — do not transcribe them here. Both are fully reviewed: 24 function rows over 80 lines and 59 cc rows over 15 (plus 1 nesting), every one carrying a verdict that says what its number IS. Read the reasons, not the numbers — and re-derive the counts from verify_code_size.py / verify_code_complexity.py, never from this line.

Four measurement facts that decided most of the remaining verdicts, and that a future reader should not re-discover:

• Heredoc payloads are not shell. assert_pinned_versions is 44 lines of shell around a 312-line embedded Python program — top of the size queue and the WORST candidate on it, because splitting the shell moves 44 lines and its cc is 7. Same shape: assert_app_venv_parity (20 around 72), _gst_xpy_write_config (14 around 70), ensure_meson_cross_file (56 around a 37-line Meson-ini template).

• Much of the cc here is a TABLE, not tangle: flag and subcommand parsers (parse_tvm_args 13 options, append_tvm_cmake_args 15, setup-dependencies.sh main 5 valued flags × 11 commands), feature tables (_ffmpeg_probe_core_codecs is fifteen if probe; then --enable-<codec> lines and nothing else), and two rows where the metric is simply literal — dump_debug_info (cc 23) holds one decision (the HOST_PYTHON guard) and otherwise ~20 which-then---version pairs each swallowed, and _torch_run_setup_py counts the size of torch’s build environment.

• Refusal matrices cost safety when flattened: _chain_prune_archived_logs (every branch is a refusal to delete the wrong thing), _manifest_wrapper_gate (the cell that decides whether a manifest would MIX releases), install_target_packages, override_soundtouch_codeberg_checksum.

• Precedence ladders where the ORDER is the contract: host_python_bin, install_abseil_headers’ five download/extract rungs, _detect_gcc_cxxabi_header, configure_opencv_build_env’s gstreamer-libdir search (the RV1-GST-PC ladder).

One row still carries a KEEP verdict worth keeping: media_common_init (29) — a module loader whose load ORDER is load-bearing. A table plus a loop would read shorter and say less; the ordering is the knowledge.

The last outside-the-closure row closed on 2026-09-18. bump_versions.py main (160) is now 32: linux/scripts/tests/test-bump-versions.sh — 40 assertions over fake specs, in-process — was the coverage it was blocked on, then the split into _parse_args / _lookup / _sweep / _safe_row / _report_row / _write_phase and the reporting helpers. Its function-size.allow and code-complexity.allow rows were deleted rather than re-baselined. Every named row left in the two registers is inside the build closure.

Two rows were given a “do not do the obvious thing” verdict; one is a row today. verify_comment_size.blocks (nesting 6) is not in code-complexity.allow: _walk_scan holds the walk and blocks measures cc 9, nesting 4 (2026-09-25; the one nesting row is smoke-android.sh check_ndk, 7). Its verdict still stands for the walk: importing verify_code_size.scan would NARROW the scan by SKIP_DIRS 'patches' (the gate’s own SCAN comment says why), which changes the gate’s scope and needs a fresh comment-size.allow baseline. And verify_package_names.load_arch (17): every branch is a way the gate must not produce a FALSE verdict, the all-or-nothing partial-fetch refusal above all.

F2. Files over ~800 lines [L each, low priority]

file-size.allow is the authority — do not transcribe it here. The gate prints files: 13 over 800 lines; 13 frozen; read it there. All rows were reviewed and all but the one historical split are NOT split targets, each with a reason a stranger can act on.

Two verdicts worth not re-litigating. build-app-wheelhouse.sh is the near-miss: the stage suites extract blocks from it by line range, so a file split silently re-aims them. And smoke-runtime-image.sh — which every earlier version of this entry nominated as THE one to split — is an explicit NO: its 99 functions (2026-09-25; 91 on 2026-09-18) are the check_* / _probe_* assertions and the probe-and-verdict layer they share, all over one image through one _rt_run under one main(). Its length is the number of assertions it makes about the shipped bytes, and that number growing is the gate succeeding.

lib/app-packaging.sh crossed 800 on 2026-09-17 (CON2’s scope probe + CON6’s finish-args block, 797 → 851); the row carries the NOT-a-split reason and the seam that kept it that way. Record in …-archive-2026-09-17.md.

Standing context, not a block: git push is the agent’s (2026-09-06) via gh auth setup-git + HTTPS remotes, and twelve of the fifteen *.sh files in linux/scripts/lib/ source a sibling lib/log-bootstrap.sh (2026-09-25) — a consumer that copied ONE lib/*.sh file out on its own breaks on its next CI run, not here.