The GitHub backend job failed on test_there_are_docs_to_check, correctly. docs/
is stripped from the published repository - it lives in the wiki on that side -
so on the mirror the glob matched nothing and the guard fired exactly as
designed.
An absent docs/ and a glob that silently matches nothing in a tree that HAS docs
are different conditions, and the test conflated them. The module now skips when
the directory is not there at all, and the guard still fails when it is there and
empty. Verified all three ways: 7 pass here, 7 skip in a docs-less checkout, and
the guard still fails against a docs/ containing no markdown.
The gate has to ship rather than be excluded from publication, because the
published tree is where the GitHub CI that would catch a regression runs.