has a uniform record length
Follows the alignment result and settles what the leading byte is.
Within one chunk the leading byte steps by a constant and wraps:
offsets: 1420 1748 2072 2392 2716 3044 3372 3700 4028 4352 ...
byte0: 0 16 32 48 64 80 96 112 128 144 ...
Sweeping every (step, phase) over all 27 levels:
fully explained: 1,262 of 1,509 chunks
by step: 8 -> 51 chunks, 16 -> 554, 32 -> 520, 64 -> 137
unexplained: 247 chunks across 11 chunk types
So on 1,262 chunks the leading byte carries no per-record information: it is a
deterministic function of the record's index and the chunk's phase, which is a
position marker rather than data. That is why the earlier "16 discrete values,
uniform counts" pattern appeared at all.
ResolvedChunk::bucket_rule returns the (step, phase) when the whole chunk fits and
None otherwise, so the 247 unexplained chunks stay distinguishable and nothing
skips a leading byte on the strength of a rule that does not apply to it.
Every chunk has a uniform record length: 1,509 of 1,509. Length varies BETWEEN
chunks of a type -- one type runs 76 to 104 bytes -- but never within one. This
withdraws the previous commit's "variable-length type", which came from pooling
minlen/maxlen across all of a type's records at once. That is the pooled-claim
error rule 3a exists to prevent, and it is the third time this session a pooled
measurement produced a claim that partitioning reversed. The type is not
variable-length; the chunk is fixed-length and different chunks differ.