Make the end-to-end suite opt-in and a separate CI step

[korya]

Problem

The end-to-end suite ran three times per CI job — about 32s of the runtime — and slowed go test ./... from 0.5s to 11s for everyone.

pre-commit chains test, test-race and test-cover, and each pulled in the full suite. Two of those runs bought almost nothing:

• test and test-cover are near-duplicates. test-cover runs the identical tests and additionally reports coverage.
• test-race was checking the wrong process. -race instruments the test binary, but the harness builds the CLI with a separate plain go build, so the race detector covered the harness and the httptest servers — not one line of http-assert. (A race build is 12.1 MB vs 9.9 MB plain; the child is the plain one.)

The redundancy predates the suite — pre-commit always ran three test passes. Adding e2e just turned a latent waste into a visible one.

Solution

Gate the suite behind an opt-in -e2e flag and give it a CI step of its own, so it runs exactly once.

just test        0.5s   unit only
just test-e2e   10.4s   the suite, explicitly
just pre-push          both, for the CI contract locally

- name: Run pre-commit checks     # build, vet, lint, unit tests, race, gosec
  run: just pre-commit

- name: Run end-to-end tests      # its own step, its own line in the CI UI
  run: just test-e2e

CI e2e time: ~32s → ~10s, and a failure now names itself instead of hiding inside a composite recipe.

Why a flag and not a build tag

A //go:build e2e file is invisible to go vet and golangci-lint unless every invocation passes the tag. Tested on a file carrying both a Printf argument mismatch and dead code:

Command	Result
go vet ./...	clean
golangci-lint run ./...	0 issues.
go vet -tags=e2e ./...	catches the Printf bug
golangci-lint run --build-tags=e2e ./...	2 issues: govet 1, unused 1

Tagging would drop 1,100 lines of test code out of both linters, silently, because the recipes are plain go vet ./... and golangci-lint run ./.... A registered flag gives the same opt-in default with every file still compiled and analysed.

Why the check lives in binary()

Putting it in the one function every e2e test already routes through means a test added later inherits the gate automatically. There is no per-file marker to forget, and no way to write an e2e test that quietly runs in the fast loop.

Coverage is unaffected: test-cover opts into -e2e itself and still reports 99.3%.

Other Changes

Adds just pre-push (pre-commit + test-e2e) — the full CI contract in one local command.

One consequence worth naming: just pre-commit no longer exercises the suite, so a break there surfaces in CI rather than before the commit. That is the intended trade — a fast inner loop, with pre-push available for anyone who wants to find out earlier.

Related:

• Add black-box e2e suite pinning the CLI config contract #57

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