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