Two bugs, one story: ./install on a machine that had been half set up before
produced no Hyprland at all, and said so in one line among twenty minutes of
scrollback.
Terra bootstraps itself with --repofrompath, which defines a throwaway repo id
just long enough to install terra-release. Run it again on a machine that
already has terra-release and dnf5 refuses the whole transaction -- the
throwaway id collides with the real one. That step sits above everything, so
set -e ended the stage before a single package was considered. It is skipped
now when terra-release is already installed.
The rest is the reason one failed repo cost the desktop. Hyprland was installed
near the bottom of the stage, below a codec swap, two group updates and a
GStreamer glob, any one of which can fail for reasons outside this repository.
It now installs directly after the packages it needs and before anything
optional, and everything fragile below it runs through a soft helper that logs
and continues rather than ending the run. What was stepped over is listed at
the end, because tolerating a failure only beats aborting on it if somebody is
told.
A missing Hyprland is still fatal, and now says so in words.
Also removes the leftover disabled solopasha/hyprland COPR, which would mix
with lionheartp's the moment anyone enabled it while debugging.
Fixes the usage widget reading 1500%: the endpoint reports percentages, not
0..1 fractions. Clamped as well, and the widget answers a click now -- it set
interactive:false, which disables the mouse area its own handler needed.
install and link-dotfiles treat it as a default; install-packages and
change-settings overwrote an exported override, so a clone anywhere but
~/.local/share/Panama sourced the extras catalog from a path that does
not exist and copied config/copy from the wrong tree.
Four installer bugs, all in the space between exit codes and intent:
- A flatpak-only extras category -- most of them -- died at the grep
that filters out its dnf half, because grep exits 1 on zero matches
and set -e read that as failure. sed deletes lines without editorial
comment. The extras contract now runs a flatpak-only category under
the installer's own strict options so this stays fixed.
- A rate-limited GitHub API call aborted the whole package stage while
resolving the RustDesk URL, even though the empty-result fallback was
sitting right below it. The pipeline is now guarded so the fallback
is reachable.
- Ctrl-C did not stop the install: the INT trap ran cleanup and bash
carried on with the remaining stages, MOK enrollment and firmware
included. INT and TERM now exit explicitly; cleanup rides EXIT.
- change-settings and link-dotfiles ran without set -e, so a failed
copy over / or a failed symlink fell through to guarded no-ops and
the stage reported success. Turning strictness on immediately caught
what it had been hiding: link-dotfiles never created ~/.config, so on
a truly fresh HOME every symlink was failing silently.
It was `panama app claude-desktop`: a source build, because nothing packaged it.
Upstream publishes an RPM repository now, so the exception shrinks to adding
that repository -- and the result upgrades with `dnf upgrade` along with
everything else instead of needing a slow rebuild every time a version ships.
That moves it out of setup/apps/ and into the third-party section of
install-packages, beside Bun, Claude Code and RustDesk. It also means it is part
of ./install for the first time. The reason it was kept out was the build: slow,
wants the network throughout, and fails on an upstream that moved, which is the
failure the interview exists to prevent. A dnf install is none of those, and the
default dock pins com.anthropic.Claude, so a fresh machine was shipping a pin
for something the install had never put there.
The repository is added with upstream's own setup script rather than a .repo
file written out here. A baseurl copied into this repository is a pin by another
name; the script is the part upstream keeps correct. Both halves are skipped
when already present, so a re-run costs nothing.
The desktop entry id does not change -- it is still com.anthropic.Claude -- so
the dock pin and the notification rules carry over untouched. The new package
drops the nodejs dependency, which is what used to hide the missing-npm bug the
launcher search contract guards; its comment said "depends" in the present
tense and now says what actually happened.
config/bash/shell sources /etc/profile.d/nvm.sh, switches Node per project from
.nvmrc, and puts PNPM_HOME on PATH. None of it worked on a fresh machine. nvm
was never installed -- it is a Terra package, present here since before Panama
-- and the source was unconditional, so every shell on a new box opened with an
error before it got as far as failing to find nvm.
That is the second instance of the same bug. $HOME/.cargo/env was the first, and
fixing it one file at a time is why this one survived: the dependency contract
scanned setup/scripts, bin and the quickshell helpers, but never config/bash --
the one place in this repository whose entire job is to name tools and source
the files that provide them.
So it scans it now, and checks the shape rather than the instance: a literal
path sourced without testing it exists is a finding, wherever it appears. It
found the nvm line, and authselect behind the fingerprint aliases.
Node and pnpm move to nvm with it. They were declared as dnf packages while the
machine ran them from ~/.nvm, which is not a preference so much as a
contradiction -- a system Node earlier on PATH wins every `nvm use`, so the
per-project switching this shell config sets up could never have worked. nvm
install --lts, then pnpm inside it, so pnpm travels with the Node version it
belongs to instead of outliving it.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Q84axqUE5inJhf5Jz9CFy1
The catalog held fourteen applications. This machine runs thirty-four flatpaks,
so most of what is actually used had no way to be installed from here at all --
Zoom, Slack, Obsidian, Spotify, LibreOffice, OBS and its sixteen plugins.
So the catalog is seeded from the machine, and `panama apps` opens it: pick a
category, tick what you want, install just those. ./install still offers the
same catalog as whole categories, because during a first install you want coarse
and fast. Both read setup/lib/extras-catalog. Two parsers would eventually
disagree about what a category contains, and the one that disagreed quietly
would be the one that runs unattended.
Two pieces of syntax earn their keep. A `| Name` suffix gives the menu something
readable, since com.obsproject.Studio is not a name anybody wants to pick from a
list. An indented line belongs to the entry above it, which is how OBS carries
its plugins as one thing to tick rather than seventeen -- they are extensions of
the flatpak, useless alone.
That is also why creative moved from dnf to Flathub: the plugins attach only to
the flatpak, so the dnf build cannot have them. The rest of the category
followed rather than leave one machine with GIMP from dnf and its neighbour from
Flathub.
The contract now reads the catalog through the same parser instead of keeping a
third idea of the format, and checks the two things this syntax can break
silently: a label leaking into an install command, and a bundle that installs
the application without its plugins. It caught a typo in the Pixelorama id on
the first run.
It also got slow enough to be worth fixing -- fifty-one names, each its own
network call. One bulk query per manager took it from minutes to four seconds.
That query needs `flatpak remote-ls --all`: without it, end-of-life applications
are hidden and read as missing, which reported yuzu as gone from Flathub when it
installs perfectly well.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Q84axqUE5inJhf5Jz9CFy1
Phase 4: the optional application categories, and the Firefox chrome.
Everything Panama installed until now was what every machine gets, which meant a
work laptop acquired emulators and a desktop that wanted Steam had to be told
about it by hand. The interview now offers the categories in
setup/packages/extras/ as a checklist -- gaming, creative, communication,
virtualization -- and nothing is preselected, because a default here installs
applications nobody chose on a machine whose owner answered a question they
thought was about something else.
A category is one file, and a category mixes both package managers because the
applications do: Steam is in RPM Fusion, Slack publishes only a flatpak. So a
bare line is a dnf package and a flatpak: line is a Flathub ID, and one file
holds the whole answer rather than splitting each category across two. The menu
is read from the directory rather than written down, so adding a category is
adding a file. Every name in all four was resolved against the actual
repositories before being written down, and the contract re-resolves them --
the point of admitting applications one at a time is that they stay installable,
and a typo here fails on somebody else's machine, not this one.
Firefox is declared, and its chrome is Edge-Frfox, vendored into config/firefox.
sunhat carried that theme with no license and no attribution; it is MIT, and now
it says so and says whose it is.
It is the only piece of Panama's configuration that does not go to a path this
repository chooses. Firefox owns the profile directory, names it with a random
salt, and does not create one until the browser has been run -- so link-dotfiles
finds or creates a profile and links both halves into it. Both, or neither works:
chrome/ is the CSS and user.js sets the preference that makes Firefox read chrome/
at all, without which the theme is a directory of dead files.
Two assumptions there were wrong, and the contract exists for both. Firefox has
moved to the XDG directories -- the profile root is ~/.config/mozilla/firefox on
this build, not ~/.mozilla/firefox, and writing to the wrong one themes nothing
and says nothing about it. And -CreateProfile turns out to be non-interactive, so
a fresh machine gets the theme on the first install rather than the second. The
contract runs link-dotfiles for real against a throwaway home with no profile in
it and looks at what came out; it was checked by pointing the search at the
legacy path only and watching it fail.
Also: the enrolment/enrollment spellings from the last commit are corrected. This
repository is US-spelled everywhere else -- color 1131 times against colour never
-- and consistency in prose is worth as much as it is in code.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01NvgBuSWB5sE43yWmg21ozj
Every list in setup/packages/ is annotated -- which package exists for which
settings page, why an exception was made -- and install-packages passed the whole
file to dnf, comment lines included.
dnf does not ignore an argument it cannot match. It reports "No match for
argument: #" and exits 1, and with set -euo pipefail at the top of that script
the first annotated list ends the stage. initial-packages carries four comments
and is the first list read, so a fresh machine got the repositories, the group
updates, and then nothing.
Two things hid it. On a machine that already has everything, a re-run matches
every real name and fails only on the comments, so the failure looks like noise
rather than the stage dying. And every contract that reads these lists strips
comments with sed before comparing -- the tests were reading a file the installer
was not, which is why a repository with a dependency contract, an assets contract
and a doctor still reported PASS across the board.
The fix is one filter used at all five call sites. The contract lifts that filter
out of the script and runs it, rather than describing what it should do, so
deleting or renaming it fails here instead of passing quietly. It also checks the
inverse -- that stripping comments does not strip packages -- because trading a
loud failure for a silent one would be worse than the bug.
Found while adding the extras lists for phase 4, which are annotated the same way
and would have hit the same wall.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01NvgBuSWB5sE43yWmg21ozj
Helium was already declared. Podman Desktop is on Flathub, so it joins the
flatpak list beside the podman it fronts.
RustDesk was the interesting one. panama-doctor has checked `rustdesk.service`
for as long as it has existed, and autostart.lua works around the tray that
service spawns -- so RustDesk was already part of this desktop, installed by
nothing. The flatpak cannot register a root-owned system service, so unattended
access needs the RPM.
Claude Code has no RPM and no flatpak either, so it takes the official installer
and keeps itself updated afterwards.
Neither pins a version. sunhat pinned upscayl 2.11.5, LACT 0.5.4 and a fedora-40
RPM, and every one of those was a 404 within a release cycle; the RustDesk URL is
resolved from whatever the latest release happens to be. Both are skipped when
already present, and a failure is logged and stepped over rather than aborting a
stage that has already installed the desktop.
That leaves three exceptions to the dnf-or-flatpak rule, all named in one place
with a reason each. The dependency contract now knows they are installed out of
band, so probing for them with `command -v` is not read as an undeclared
dependency -- narrowly, per command, so a genuine omission still fails.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Q84axqUE5inJhf5Jz9CFy1
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
Gabriel Brown
gib