Upstream sync blocked: refresh stale obligation review dates + resolve the current 114-commit merge

[joeshull]

End-to-end dry run of the upstream-sync maintainer flow (detect → validate → execute) against current upstream/develop (a1c05ffc). The tooling works and every guardrail fired correctly, but it surfaced two blockers that must be cleared before a real sync can produce a publishable PR. No PR was created — execute hard-stopped on merge conflict with no push, as designed.

Blocker 1 — the obligations ledger is stale (blocks validate)

validate refuses with affected obligations blocked: deploy-installer, omp-settings-agent-paths, sync-tooling, zge-push-vapid — all 4 obligations are "stale review."

Root cause: upstream-sync/ledger/obligations.json sets every review_date to 2026-07-21 (the authoring day). The validator computes isStale = review_date < assessmentDate (scripts/upstream-sync/validator.mjs), and assessmentDate defaults to today. So the obligations went stale the very next day. review_date is effectively a review-by / valid-through date and must be set in the future, not to "today."

Fix:

• Re-review the 4 obligations and set review_date to a forward date (e.g. align with expiry, or a review cadence).
• Consider making the "set review_date = today" convention impossible to repeat — this is the same time-sensitivity class that broke the executor tests (fixed in test: pin SYNC_AS_OF in upstream-sync executor tests (review-date time bomb) #67 by pinning SYNC_AS_OF).

Blocker 2 — the current upstream delta is heavily conflicted (blocks execute)

Range main (5e327462) → develop (a1c05ffc) = 114 upstream commits / 2520 changed paths, flagged high-risk:{dependency,deployment,workflow}, with all 4 obligations affected. execute merges the exact upstream pin and hit content conflicts across core files (server.ts, event-wiring.ts, pairing/browser-gateway.ts, session/session-api.ts, shared/browser-protocol.ts, several AGENTS.md, …), then hard-stopped: exact upstream merge failed; resolve conflicts manually.

Fix: a real sync requires deliberate, hands-on conflict resolution that preserves ZGE behavior (the 4 obligations + un-cataloged divergences). Not automatable in one shot.

Context / notes

• Prior sync work exists (sync/upstream-develop, sync/upstream-develop-resolution, sync-main-baseline, design/upstream-sync-maintainer), but it's tooling development + baseline establishment — main is based on upstream/develop@e75445fc (~2026-07-17). None of those branches have integrated the current 114-commit delta; they're all still 114 behind upstream/develop. So this sync is genuinely un-done.
• The obligations ledger (4 entries) is smaller than the fork's real divergence surface (2520 files). Un-cataloged ZGE customizations that upstream also touched won't be flagged preserve-zge automatically — review any sync PR carefully for those.
• The merge-base is only ~5 days old and upstream moves ~100 commits / 5 days, so the conflict set grows the longer this waits.