`hermes cron status` (and the create/list 'gateway not running' nag)
judge whether cron will fire purely from the in-process ticker's
heartbeat file + a live gateway PID. That heuristic is correct for the
built-in ticker but WRONG for an external provider like Chronos:
Chronos arms exactly one external one-shot per job and is fired by a
NAS-mediated webhook (POST /api/cron/fire). Its `start()` returns
immediately and it deliberately runs no 60s loop and writes no ticker
heartbeat — that's the whole point of scale-to-zero (the machine is at
zero between fires). So on a perfectly healthy Chronos instance,
`cron status` always printed '✗ Gateway is not running — cron jobs will
NOT fire' (or a STALLED-ticker warning), and `cron create` always
appended the 'jobs won't fire automatically' nag — both false.
Verified live on a staging Chronos instance: jobs fired and completed on
schedule via the relay while `cron status` insisted the gateway wasn't
running and the heartbeat was 370s+ stale.
Fix: resolve the active provider (offline — `resolve_cron_scheduler`,
whose `is_available()` contract forbids network) and, for any non-builtin
provider, report the managed-scheduler state instead of the ticker
heuristics, and suppress the ticker-only 'gateway not running' warning.
The built-in path is byte-unchanged. Active-job summary is factored into
a shared helper so both paths print it identically.
New tests prove both directions (chronos: no false negative even with no
gateway PID / no heartbeat; builtin: historical warning preserved) and
fail without the fix.
Ben Barclay
0943e2a272