sunhat's failure mode was a question twenty minutes into a run. Walking away
from an install meant coming back to a prompt that had been waiting an hour.
So the questions move to the front. A new interview stage asks what Panama needs
to be told -- hostname, git identity, whether to sign in to GitHub, whether to
make an SSH key -- shows the answers back, and asks once to proceed. After that
nothing asks again. gum is bootstrapped before it runs, because the interview is
built on gum and gum arrives with a stage that has not run yet.
Answers reach the stages through a mktemp file that install sources and the
existing trap deletes, since a child process cannot export into its siblings.
They are not remembered between runs: there is no state file to go stale, and
one of the answers is an email address.
The interview asks only what a stage in this repository actually consumes.
Extras, hardware and debloat questions arrive with the stages that act on them
-- a prompt whose answer nothing reads is a control that lies. The new contract
pins that in both directions, and four deliberate mutations confirmed it catches
a question nobody reads, a stage reading something nobody asks, an answers file
left on disk, and a declined interview that fails to stop the run.
The run now ends with panama-doctor, because a failed-stage count says nothing
about a service that did not start. It never changes the exit code: on a fresh
machine, unconfigured is the honest answer, not a failure.
espanso and oh-my-posh stop being exceptions -- Terra packages espanso-wayland
and Fedora packages oh-my-posh, so the curl installer is gone. bun is now the
only remaining one.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Q84axqUE5inJhf5Jz9CFy1
The initial package list was quoted into a single bogus dnf argument
and every dnf error was discarded, so a fresh install silently skipped
most of it. Two package lists were never wired into the pipeline at
all, and change-settings ran before install-packages, so the vicinae
theme step was permanently skipped. Fixed the ordering, the quoting,
and stopped swallowing errors.
Separately, hypridle could start with its WAYLAND_DISPLAY condition
unmet if it raced the env-publish call, silently never starting --
and it's the only listener for the logind Lock signal. Made the start
wait on the environment synchronously. panama-idle also wrote its
generated config to a fixed temp path with no locking, so concurrent
applies could interleave into a corrupt file; switched to mktemp plus
an atomic mv.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E6TJUAh41HaP25MVHWkhRZ
Two things stood between this repository and a machine that could
install it.
The installer aborted on its own first question. The hostname prompt
defaults to N, and the N branch ran `exit` -- so pressing Enter, the
obvious answer when you do not want to rename your machine, skipped the
entire installation and said nothing about it. Declining now just
declines. The installer is also safe to re-run, which is the upgrade
path too: it reports which stages failed instead of scrolling the
failure past twenty minutes ago, and restores the idle settings on every
exit path rather than only on success.
The package lists had drifted badly from what the configs and helpers
actually use. jq alone has thirty-one call sites across the helpers and
the contracts; kitty has a full shipped config and a dock pin; tmux and
btop have shipped themes the colour scheme switches; ddcutil, qrencode
and orca back features added today. None were declared. Neither were
fontconfig, pciutils, libselinux-utils, libnotify, wireplumber, fwupd or
python3-dnf, all of which shipped scripts invoke by name. A fresh
machine following this repository's own instructions would have got a
desktop whose features quietly were not there -- the helpers report "not
installed" rather than crashing, which is good behaviour and completely
silent.
So the lists are corrected and a contract now checks that every external
command Panama's scripts invoke is installed by Panama's packages.
Writing it was instructive about its own blind spots. The first version
reported `then`, `esac` and `done` as missing packages, burying the real
findings. The second passed while jq was undeclared, because the pattern
required three characters and jq is two -- a dependency checker with a
blind spot for short names is worse than none, since it reports PASS.
The third missed ddcutil, which is only ever invoked as `timeout 10
ddcutil` and so never appears statement-initial. It now also reads
`command -v X`, which is how these helpers probe for a tool and
therefore the clearest statement of a dependency there is. Verified it
catches jq, ddcutil and qrencode individually.
Also replaced a fixed 0.3s sleep in the write contract with a bounded
wait. It was failing about one run in three with "a rejected value did
not surface an error" when the error had simply not arrived yet, which
reads as a missing guard rather than a slow one.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
Gabriel Brown
gib