./install only ever adds. It copies over /, links dotfiles, installs
packages -- and has no way to say "remove that file", "disable that
unit", "that symlink points nowhere now". So a machine set up months
ago keeps whatever this repository has since decided was wrong, and
the only thing that ever fixes it is somebody reading a commit
message. With a curl installer in the README, that stopped being
hypothetical.
A migration is one script that performs one repair, exactly once, on
the machines that need it. Named by the commit timestamp that authored
it, so glob order is chronological without a sequence number two
branches could both pick. Marked in ~/.local/state on success and only
on success, so a repair that failed stays pending rather than being
recorded as done and hidden forever. Ordered, and stopped at the first
failure, because a later repair may assume an earlier one landed. A
fresh install marks everything without running it, the way
Migrations.qml stamps a pre-versioning settings file at its baseline.
The first real one removes the dangling ~/.config/forge symlink left
behind when the GNOME session was cut: link-dotfiles could link it but
never unlink it. Verified both ways -- a no-op on a machine that never
had it, an actual repair on one that did.
Root work goes through panama-sudo --reason so the password prompt
names the repair, and the contract fails any migration reaching for
bare sudo.
espanso-wayland was installed and its config linked, and then nothing
anywhere launched it -- the RPM ships no unit, autostart.lua started
every session daemon except this one, and the seed machine only worked
because the service had once been registered by hand. change-settings
now runs `espanso service register` (upstream's own mechanism, and
unlike hypridle it conflicts with nothing GNOME runs), and autostart.lua
starts the unit so the first Hyprland login after a fresh install
expands text rather than the second.
hyprpolkitagent's dialog is compiled into its binary -- no config, no
stylesheet, nothing to theme -- and it was the one window on this
desktop that looked like it belonged to something else.
The split between the two halves is the security design, not an
implementation detail. A small agent process owns the D-Bus side: it
registers with polkitd, receives the request, and hands the shell the
action, the message, who may answer, and a one-time cookie. It never
sees a password. The shell draws the prompt and, on submit, spawns the
setuid polkit-agent-helper-1 itself and writes the password to that
helper's stdin; the helper runs the PAM conversation and reports to
polkitd directly. The password exists in the shell and in the helper's
stdin and nowhere else -- never on a command line, never over D-Bus,
never through IPC arguments.
The prompt takes exclusive keyboard focus, because a password field that
lets keystrokes reach the window behind it is a keylogger with extra
steps. The request travels as a file created 0600 with O_EXCL inside a
0700 runtime directory: a cookie is not a password, but it is a
capability, and capabilities do not belong in a process listing either.
Three things cost real time. polkitd calls back on the same connection
that registered, so exporting the object on the session bus while
registering from the system bus failed every request as "Not authorized"
with no error anywhere. XDG_SESSION_ID is absent in a systemd user unit,
which runs under [email protected] and belongs to no login session, so the
session comes from logind's Display property instead. And PyGObject does
not accept the @ placeholder in variant format strings.
hyprpolkitagent stays installed as the fallback, only one agent is
started, and the comment beside the autostart says how to get the stock
prompt back. Verified end to end, including a real password accepted and
three cancellations refused.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
Both already have a ~/.config/autostart/*.desktop entry, and systemd's
own xdg-autostart generator turns that into a graphical-session.target
unit that fires on its own -- confirmed live via `systemctl --user
list-units 'app-*@autostart.service'`. autostart.lua was also launching
both explicitly, on the (apparently outdated) assumption that nothing
else would. For Bitwarden this was actively harmful: each `flatpak run`
gets its own sandbox instance, so the duplicate launch left two
processes fighting over the app's single-instance lock, with neither
reliably owning a usable window -- this is what "can't open Bitwarden"
traced back to, alongside a live document-portal fuse mount that had
silently died (fixed by restarting xdg-document-portal.service; not a
config issue, so nothing to commit there).
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E6TJUAh41HaP25MVHWkhRZ
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