Install it on a machine that has nothing, nightly

[tamnd]

The install item on zu-c's scorecard: a clean-machine install test, nightly, in a container holding the language runtime and nothing else.

CI runs on a machine that has everything. The install job this repository already had installs into a prefix and builds cmake/consumer against it, which is worth having and is still not what a user does: the whole thing happens inside a checkout on a runner where every tool is already present, so it cannot tell you whether the install is self-sufficient.

The rows

Image	Given	Installs by
gcc:15-bookworm	cmake	find_package(zu-cpp)
debian:13-slim	g++, cmake, make	find_package(zu-cpp)
debian:13-slim	g++	the include path and one -l

The third row is the only honest way to check the claim the README makes for a project that would rather not use CMake, because it is on an image with no CMake on it at all.

Each row installs the wrapper, takes both programs off the README, builds them against the install, runs each in a directory of its own since both write social.zu1 beside themselves, and diffs what they print against the block under them on the page. The C program is in there because it needs nothing out of this repository, which is the point: it says the SDK a user was handed is enough on its own.

The image is checked rather than believed. The day a base image starts shipping a Rust toolchain is the day this job quietly stops being about anything, so the absent list is asserted, and so is the absence of a zu.h, a zu.hpp, a libzu and a pkg-config entry for one.

The half that is usually left out

A job that only ever passes is a job nobody has seen fail. So each row runs again with a piece taken out of the install, after the install rather than out of the source, and the build has to stop:

• without zu.hpp in the prefix, the compile has to fail
• without the CMake package in the prefix, find_package has to fail
• without the engine, the link has to fail

If any of them still worked, the compiler found something on the image and every pass above meant nothing.

Checked

On a Linux box with docker rather than reasoned about. Three rows green, all eight break runs failing, each for the reason it was supposed to:

=== a gcc image, given cmake
installed in cmake mode and ran both programs on the page
  without the header: failed, as it must
  without the package: failed, as it must
  without the sdk: failed, as it must
=== a bare machine, given a compiler and cmake
installed in cmake mode and ran both programs on the page
  without the header: failed, as it must
  without the package: failed, as it must
  without the sdk: failed, as it must
=== a bare machine with no cmake at all
installed in header mode and ran both programs on the page
  without the header: failed, as it must
  without the sdk: failed, as it must

And the header break fails at #include <zu.hpp>, which is the message a user would get.

The engine arrives as an SDK laid out on disk, since there is no release yet, in the layout ZU_ROOT documents and a release archive unpacks to. What that leaves out is the download and the signature, and those arrive on the day the first tag does.