[ptr727]

Relates #1317, #1442.

Answers the one finding Copilot raised on the develop -> main promotion pull request #1442. A
finding there needs its own feature branch, since the promotion PR's head is develop.

The defect

tree_source() reduced "", ".", "./", "/", "//" and whitespace to an empty result, and
manifest_carried_destination() read that as the repository root declared as a carried tree. Every
declared destination was then refused with a message saying it is carried to other repositories,
which blames the destination when the source is what needs fixing.

No tree may name the repository root: spec/validate.py says so in its own words ("must be below
the repository root") and scripts/carry.py enforces it by comparing PurePosixPath objects. So
the empty reduction is refused by its own name now, and the caller's root-tree branch goes with it,
having been reachable only from a manifest this refuses first.

The correction inside this branch

The first commit's message said such a source is one "which its schema forbids". That is false for
exactly the inputs it fires on. spec/files.schema.json constrains a tree source as
{"type": "string", "minLength": 1, "not": {"const": "."}}, so it forbids "" and "." and
nothing else, while "./" and ".///." are schema-valid, reduce the same way, and are the only two
spellings that reach the guard in a repository spec/validate.py already passes. The message would
have sent a maintainer to re-read a schema permitting what they wrote.

The second commit says the reduction instead, which is what the code decides, and names the
schema's two forbidden spellings as the subset they are. The docstring and the test's own name and
docstring carried the same claim and moved in the same edit.

Verification

All gates green: build_dist.py --check, 1166 unit tests, ruff format and check, mypy,
prose_lint.py, repo_gate.py, spec/validate.py, canonical_review.py check.

Two adversarial passes ran over the branch diff. The first found the false schema claim above. The
second reports no false statement and no bug, and proved the change is not a behavior regression by
differencing the old and new tree_source() over 3,906 generated spellings: they differ on 133
inputs, all of them cases where the old function returned "", and agree exactly on every input
carrying a real segment. The removed root-tree branch was proved unreachable over 9,331 spellings
rather than assumed.

Against the real manifest nothing moves: its one tree source is .github/skills, all four
reference targets still refuse, and README.md, docs/fleet-map.md and repo-config/README.md
still admit.

Known and not fixed here

spec/validate.py compares a tree source to "." as a raw string, so "./" and ".///." pass it
and pass its is_dir test, while carry.py refuses both. A manifest author gets a green validator
and a failing carrier. Pre-existing, and this branch closes it only for build_dist.py's own
consumer.

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[Copilot]

🟢 Approval recommended

The change is narrowly scoped, removes a misleading behavior path, and adds targeted test coverage for the corrected refusal behavior.

Pull request overview

This PR fixes a validation edge case in build_dist where certain trees[].source spellings could reduce to the repository root, which previously led to misleading refusal errors that blamed destinations rather than the invalid source.

Changes:

• Refuse tree sources that reduce to the repository root in tree_source() with a targeted error message.
• Remove the now-unnecessary “root tree carries everything” branch from manifest_carried_destination().
• Add/adjust unit tests to cover root-reducing spellings and keep segment-spelling matching tests focused on valid tree sources.

File summaries

File	Description
scripts/build_dist.py	Adds an explicit guard for root-reducing tree sources and simplifies carried-destination detection accordingly.
scripts/tests/test_build_dist.py	Updates existing coverage and adds a dedicated test for rejecting sources that reduce to the repository root.

Review details

• Files reviewed: 2/2 changed files
• Comments generated: 0
• Review effort level: Lite

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