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 shell named a font, a pointer theme and a wallpaper that no package list
installed and no stage placed. It went unnoticed because this machine collected
all three under sunhat and never lost them; a fresh Fedora box would have come
up with tofu for every shell glyph, the default pointer, and no wallpaper --
while Wallpaper.qml called that missing file `shippedPath`.
The dependency contract reported PASS throughout, because it reads commands that
scripts invoke and none of these are one. The new assets contract covers what it
structurally cannot: fonts and pointer themes named in configs and gsettings, a
shipped wallpaper that must exist, commands launched from QML, and directories
nothing puts into service. Written against the broken tree first, where it found
ten faults.
Four of those were packages nobody had noticed were missing -- gnome-calendar,
podman, pipewire-utils and flatpak -- alongside gnome-control-center, which backs
fifteen rows of Panama's own Settings and is commented so it is not mistaken for
GNOME-session residue later.
Fonts turned out to need no install stage at all. Terra, which install-packages
already enables, packages every Nerd Font, so sunhat's wget-and-unzip is replaced
by five lines in a package list. The pointer theme had no such luck: it is
packaged nowhere, so it is vendored rather than downloaded from a URL that can
rot.
espanso stays undeclared. It is in no enabled repository, and building it from
source is the install method this repository is trying to stop using.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Q84axqUE5inJhf5Jz9CFy1
Seeding is deliberately conservative: a role whose preferred applications
are all missing is left alone rather than forced. That is right, and it
is also silent -- so a curated handler nobody installs presents as the
machine quietly going back to deciding defaults by installation order,
which is the problem seeding exists to fix. None of Loupe, Papers,
Decibels, Nautilus, mpv or sushi was declared anywhere.
Preview works, on org.gnome.NautilusPreviewer2 rather than the interface
its bus name suggests, but it opened tiled -- shoving the file manager
aside for something meant to be an overlay -- so it gets a float and
center rule sized to leave the file underneath visible.
xdg-utils and desktop-file-utils were undeclared too; seeding from
link-dotfiles started calling them, and the dependency contract said so.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
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
Gabriel Brown
gib