A.20:4.4 - Gate and policy boundary

An A.21 gate may consume an exact A.20 result or summary as one declared input. A.20 does not translate satisfied, violated, or unresolved into pass, degrade, block, or abstain; A.21 applies the current gate rule to its complete check set.

Every other applicable gate-fit check keeps its own result. A failed or unresolved internal constraint may prevent the aggregate gate decision from passing, but it does not make freshness, system-role fit, channel fit, regulatory conformance, reference-plane crossing, or another independent fact undefined or not applicable.

An implementation may defer expensive evaluation work after an already blocking result. That is a Work or evaluation policy. A deferred required check remains notRun; it is not published as not applicable or as a successful neutral value. Any aggregate decision must preserve that incompleteness under A.21.