A first-boot acceptance ask is planted deliberately unanswerable: it describes
work that becomes possible only when the device is next recreated, and it must
STAY owed until then, because closing it early to tidy the mailbox is exactly how
that work gets lost. deriveOwed could only see "directed, open, not answered, not
withdrawn", so such an ask was announced at every session start and every poll
for as long as it was correctly waiting -- measured at three days running on
emb-7kj4vr4g (2026-09-28 -> 2026-10-01), and across three consecutive releases
before that. The ask was right; announcing it was wrong, and the cost landed on
the human reading the window, who is the one reader that cannot filter it.
An ask may now declare the condition under which it is merely waiting:
"dormant_unless": [
{ "kind": "json_field", "path": "/etc/pi-devbox/build-manifest.json",
"field": "release_tag", "baseline": "v1.9.4" },
{ "kind": "file_mtime", "path": "/etc/hostname",
"baseline": "2026-09-22T18:12:49Z" }
]
Dormant while EVERY condition still matches its baseline; live the moment ANY
differs -- which is the trigger those asks already stated in prose ("act when
EITHER differs"), now in a form the bridge can check. Two kinds, local files
only, no expression language, no shell, no network: a general evaluator in the
path that decides whether work is VISIBLE is a far worse trade than a clumsy
schema.
DORMANCY IS PROVEN, NEVER ASSUMED. Every unevaluable predicate announces the ask
instead of hiding it: missing file, unreadable file, unparseable baseline,
unknown kind, vanished field, relative path, more than eight conditions. The
dangerous failure here is not a spurious nag but work that disappears because a
predicate could not be evaluated -- indistinguishable from the ask being lost,
and not surfacing until a release needed it. An ask with no dormant_unless
behaves exactly as before, so this is backward compatible by construction.
Withheld from the ANNOUNCEMENT, never from the mailbox: deriveOwed now returns a
partition {owed, dormant} rather than a flat list, the wake-up injection lists
dormant asks once per session with ids, and a mid-session poll adds only a count
and only when the window is already open for something else. Dormant asks are
deliberately NOT added to the `surfaced` map, so one becomes announceable the
instant its baseline moves.
file_mtime compares WHOLE SECONDS in UTC. A filesystem mtime carries sub-second
residue (measured: /etc/hostname at .773761009) that a reported ISO baseline
never will, so comparing raw milliseconds would mark every such predicate
permanently "changed" -- silently disabling the feature while appearing to work.
The test records the residue for that reason.
scripts/test-dormancy.sh is this repo's first test: 22 cases, positive and
negative arms both, because a predicate that never fires makes the feature inert
and one that fires too eagerly hides real work. It copies the extension into a
temp tree with pi's typebox symlinked beside it (the copy is made per-run, so it
cannot drift like a vendored duplicate), owns its own fixtures rather than
reading /etc paths -- the first draft passed only on a pi-devbox container and
would have silently flipped to "not dormant" anywhere else -- and exits 2 for
INCONCLUSIVE rather than 0, since a test that skips quietly is the failure mode
it exists to catch. shellcheck clean.
Joakim Persson
975ab92943