Chasing a reported shear on rotate and straighten. Two tests, and what they
prove is that the pipeline is not where it comes from.
A circle is the shape that makes anisotropy unmissable: any transform scaling
the axes unequally returns an ellipse, and the ratio of its axes is the error.
Both a quarter turn and a 20° straighten, on a 3:2 frame, return a circle
within 8%.
Worth recording because I had a confident and wrong hypothesis first. The
quarter turn carries `* aspect.x` on one component and `/ aspect.x` on the
other, which reads like an anisotropy of a-squared, and the reasoning that
`p` is already isotropic is plausible enough that I changed it. The existing
`a_quarter_turn_corrects_for_aspect_across_the_swap` caught that immediately,
and these tests then showed the original was right all along: the crop rect is
expressed in the *turned* frame and the output axes swap with it, so the
factors are the conversion between those spaces rather than a mistake.
Reading the shader and reasoning about which space `p` lives in is exactly how
a plausible formula gets written twice. These assert on real pixels off a real
adapter instead, so the next person to suspect this transform can rule it out
in one command.
The shear is therefore in the display path — the fit from the framed size to
the viewport, or the crop overlay's uncropped render — and not in the geometry
the pipeline computes. Not yet fixed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>