Cylc validate doesn't test suite config against metadata?

The command cylc validate . doesn’t check the compliance of templates variables in rose-suite.conf against their metadata schema, the way rose macro -V would.

Is that expected behavior?

I figured I could create a R1 task doing rose macro -V, to do the job, but this could have its own issues since the validation is only done at runtime.

Yes, this is expected at the moment (and note that rose suite-run never did this either). We have an issue to consider adding support for this: https://github.com/cylc/cylc-rose/issues/23