A test asserts a phrase against rich-wrapped stderr, so it passes on path length

tests/entry_points/test_e2e_build.py::test_an_empty_store_says_so asserts a phrase against stderr that rich rendered:

assert "docir reindex" in str(result.stderr), "the fix was not named"

Under CliRunner the output is not a terminal, so rich takes its width from COLUMNS and otherwise falls back to 80. The warning embeds the store path, so the wrap lands wherever that path length puts it:

warning: no documents found in
/tmp/pytest-of-serj/pytest-1/test_an_empty_store_says_so0/docir — the site will
be empty. The index is derived and gitignored, so a fresh clone needs `docir
reindex` first.

The phrase is there and a newline sits inside it. The same test passes at COLUMNS=200 and fails at 80.

Why it stayed hidden¶

Nothing about the message or the command changed. The break position is a function of the temp directory pytest happened to name, so whether the assertion holds depends on the length of a path — CI has been green since the test landed, which is luck rather than evidence. A runner path a few characters longer or shorter moves the break onto a different word.

This is the failure mode the project's own testing note describes: a test that has never failed has not been shown to work. Here it is the inverse — a test that failed locally while proving nothing about the code.

The same class, elsewhere¶

• tests/entry_points/test_e2e_cli.py:491 — "prefix 'adr' -> 'dec'", four tokens, breakable the same way.
• tests/entry_points/test_e2e_schema.py:121 — "nonsense", a single token, so it can only break if it exceeds the whole width.

Fix¶

Pinning COLUMNS from a fixture does not work: rich reads that variable in Console.__init__, and entry_points/cli/rendering.py constructs its two consoles at import time — long before any fixture runs. The width has to be set on the console objects themselves, where monkeypatch.setattr also restores it afterwards.

Wide is not the same as wider, either. A larger width only moves the break: rendered at every width from 50 to 205, this message splits docir reindex at 19 of them, including 79-81 and 187-195. The pin is 500 — past the length of any notice docir prints, so they do not wrap at all.