ADR-0003 — Severity, status and strict-mode semantics

• Status: Accepted
• Date: 2026-07 (as embodied in the 0.2.0b1 codebase)

Context

Publishers and explorers need different failure thresholds. Some gaps (especially governance) should warn without failing casual runs.

Decision

• Severities: error, warning, information.
• Normal mode: only errors fail report.status.
• Strict mode (strict=True / --strict): warnings also fail.
• Information never fails status.
• CLI exit 0/1 follow status; exit 2 is for execution failures.
• AGG001 (missing aggregation method) is a warning.

Consequences

• CI must opt into --strict to enforce warnings.
• Exploratory validation remains usable on bare pipeline exports.

Alternatives considered

• Always fail on warnings — rejected as too harsh for beta adoption.
• Never fail on aggregation gaps — rejected for publishing use cases.

References

• src/cp_anndata_validator/models/report.py (status derivation)
• src/cp_anndata_validator/checks/aggregation.py
• tests/test_api.py, tests/test_cli.py