nx_media_index_gate.nx

nx_media_index_gate.nx -- REFEREE for EXPOSURE rung X1 (nx_media_index). Calls nx_mindex_tag_path on REAL inputs and asserts the pipeline: a real gallery PNG decodes and tags (proving decode + presence run INSIDE the indexer on a real file), a non-PNG is rejected cleanly, a missing path is handled, and a real JPEG person-photo decodes at its known dimensions. The presence VERDICT on the real photo is REPORTED, never asserted to a fixed value -- the content is unknown, and the presence MATH is already gated by nx_presence_gate. license_tier: ORIGINAL D001 MIGRATION 2026-09-01 (/compare/mediaingest). This gate had no elf: /api/promote refuses a gate that rolls its own verdict, so it could never become an artifact and this domain's evidence base carried its NAME without its RESULT. Three things changed, and only the third is cosmetic: 1. EIGHT CONJUNCTS BECAME EIGHT TEETH. The old main() ANDed eight assertions into one `ok` boolean and printed a single verdict. A ONE-STATE JUDGE CANNOT SAY WHICH CONJUNCT FAILED -- it reports RED and the reader re-derives the whole thing by hand. Worse, a tooth that silently stops running lowers nothing, because there was no denominator. gv_ctr/gv_check make declared == executed by construction and name the failure. 2. THE ABSENT-FIXTURE CASE NOW ABSTAINS INSTEAD OF FAILING. Two teeth read specific files from the live library. If one of those is moved or reaped, the old gate went RED -- indistinguishable from the INDEXER being broken, which is the alarming misreading of a healthy system. gv_need degrades those to SKIP and says so. An axis that cannot see must abstain, never acquit AND never convict. 3. THE SCRATCH FILE MOVED OUT OF THE SHARED TREE. The old gate wrote its NOTPNG fixture into knowledge/staging/media/, which a production beat also walks -- a gate must not share its fixture with production, or its RED tracks the fixture rather than the code. It now writes /tmp/<gate>/, created at SETUP (a teardown does not run when a run crashes).