Reading compliance failures

A compliance line is a claim about one input and one library, tied to one published section. It is not a score.

Anatomy

COMPLIANCE MUST NOT FAIL [json-8259-bare-nan] json
  Standard : RFC 8259 8259
  Section  : 6 — Numbers
  Spec     : https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8259#section-6
  Rule     : Numeric values are produced from the number grammar; NaN is not a number token.
  Expected : reject
  Observed : accepted as nan
  Case     : NaN is not a JSON number

Field	Meaning
`MUST` / `MUST NOT` / `SHOULD`	How strong the cited rule is
`FAIL`	This adapter did not match `Expected`
`[id]`	Stable case id (search the JSON file)
last token (`json`)	Serializer name
`Spec`	Click-through to the paragraph
`Expected`	`accept` or `reject` from the rule
`Observed`	What the library did

PASS lines (only in --detailed) still carry the same URL.

Version mismatches are expected

The same bytes can be required under one version and forbidden under another.

Input	RFC 4627	RFC 7159 / 8259
`"harbor"` as the whole document	reject (text must be object/array)	accept (any value)
UTF-16LE BOM + `{}`	not the 4627 story	7159: allowed encodings; 8259: UTF-8 only

Input	YAML 1.1	YAML 1.2 JSON/Core
`flag: yes`	boolean `true`	string `"yes"`

Input	TOML 1.0	TOML 1.1
`{ harbor = "kelp", }`	reject	accept

A library that implements today’s JSON (8259) will “fail” the 4627 top-level-scalar cases. That is the catalog working, not a bug in orjson.

What to do with a FAIL

Open Spec.
Decide whether you care about that version. Most new services want RFC 8259 + I-JSON habits, not RFC 4627.
If you need the stricter profile, configure the library (or pick another). The catalog does not change library defaults.

What never fails the command

Library FAILs are printed, written to logs/compliance/<timestamp>.json, and shown on Dashboard · Compliance (add /{lang}/{serializer} to land on one row). The command stays exit 0 unless the catalog or runner is broken.

That is deliberate. Treating every historical MUST as a hard error would fail this repo’s own Python stdlib (json.loads("NaN")) and PyYAML’s YAML 1.1 bools on day one.