4 Commits

Author	SHA1	Message	Date
joakimp	34cf1e3810	release: v1.8.8, and a notice that named the wrong remedy ... Freezes the v1.8.8 section and clears the two non-code checklist items pi@emb-7kj4vr4g handed over (evt_20260826T134919_a614ecfc2d4f), plus the two carried nits from its round-2 verification (evt_20260826T133356_d56792791a49). Every claim below was re-measured here rather than taken from the handoff. THE STALENESS NOTICE ASSERTED A DIRECTION IT NEVER TESTED — Blocker 1's shape, one layer down, in the message I added to replace the message that named the wrong cause. The notice fired on "recorded != HEAD" and then announced HEAD as the newer side without testing ancestry, so a clone that was merely BEHIND got "has moved to 82a8d3c; the snapshot describes the older 5fd0d5c" when 82a8d3c is 5fd0d5c's ANCESTOR. Found by EMB against the real state of its own host, not a fabrication. The verdict was never wrong (rc 0, nothing mis-verified) but the remedy it implies is a ~67-minute base rebuild when the actual fix is `git pull` — the only one of the two carried nits with a price tag, which is why it went first. Now tests ancestry with the merge-base --is-ancestor primitive the refresh path 60 lines below already used, and reports three verdicts: stale (refresh), clone behind (pull, do NOT refresh), diverged (reconcile). All three verified by execution; only the first was correct before. --help no longer errors on the one script whose argument order was itself a landmine. The `-s "$VENDORED"` guard is now commented as load-bearing: it makes the empty-stdin collision unreachable by construction, which also means no test below exercises it any more, so deleting it as "redundant with the probes" would silently restore the false OK. CHANGELOG: retitled, and three stale spots fixed in what becomes the permanent record. It cited the skill at 82a8d3c (twice superseded); it RE-ASSERTED the retracted mailbox measurement as live evidence 200 lines after withdrawing it, which is the exact non-contradiction failure this release exists to fix; and its warning block still described the pre-e8ddeaf world ("still records c04cd15", "now exits 1") while quoting as exemplary the very notice whose direction was unverified. Per EMB's steer the conclusion was kept and only the evidence replaced: the status filter does drop broadcast noise, it just never computed owed-ness. Honest replacement, measured on both machines: raw filter returns 2 here and 1 there, EVERY ONE already answered, derivation returns 0 for both. SNAPSHOT RESYNCED AGAIN, 5fd0d5c -> 6eb20af, because skillset 6eb20af adds the limit of my own seq ordering test: seq is REPLICA-LOCAL, equal to origin_seq only because one replica authors for all four machines, so use hlc once mesh_peers reports a peer. Recorded as reasoning not measurement — a second replica cannot be stood up here. The durable half is the asymmetry: seq skew makes an ANSWERED item resurface (noise, visible, self-correcting) while created_at SUPPRESSES AN UNANSWERED ask forever (silent, permanent), so the skill now says outright that "fixing" a resurfacing item with a timestamp trades the safe failure for the dangerous one. The resync was free: rootfs/ was already changing, so the base rebuild was forced regardless — the ordering warning about accidental staleness does not apply to a deliberate refresh before the tag. --check is a clean OK at 6eb20af with no notice, canary re-verified bidirectionally (present 3, withdrawn 0), baked snapshot 0644, tree hash recomputed at build time and re-verified in-container. bash -n clean; shellcheck/hadolint/actionlint remain absent locally, so CI is still the only evidence for those.	2026-08-26 15:56:03 +02:00
joakimp	e8ddeaf89f	skills: a gate that could pass without checking, and a mailbox that never empties ... Fixes the three blockers and seven should-fixes from pi@emb-7kj4vr4g's review (logstream correlation skills-provenance-review, full text in drawer_pi-devbox_reviews_e43e766641c9ec85217bc6ce). Every finding was reproduced by execution here before being fixed; two were refined by that reproduction rather than taken as given. BLOCKER 1 — the provenance gate could print OK and exit 0 without verifying. `git show <ref>:<path> | sha256sum` hashes EMPTY STDIN when the ref does not resolve, so at_ref was never empty and the UNKNOWN branch was dead code. Measured: a bogus ref reported MISMATCH — accusing the snapshot of lying when the real cause was an incomplete clone, and the operator's natural remedy for MISMATCH is to re-run the refresh, which rewrites provenance to silence the complaint; and with a 0-byte snapshot against a 0-byte upstream file it printed "OK: exactly skillset@aaaaaaa" with exit 0 for a ref that does not exist. The script already had the sha_empty idiom and had applied it to blob_sha but not to at_ref. Existence is now PROVEN with git cat-file -e before anything is hashed, at two levels (ref resolves / path exists at it) because those deserve different messages. Same defect class as the canary it replaces: a check that can succeed without checking. A second, unflagged instance of the same pipeline shape in blob_sha was found and fixed too. Exit codes split, because the old contract failed the sanctioned case: 0 truthful (including stale, with a NOTICE), 1 a lying record only, 2 cannot determine. AGENTS.md step 2 promised "the message distinguishes the two" and was the thing this branch was breaking; rewritten to state all three. BLOCKER 3 — VENDORED.md contradicted itself in the release whose stated invariant is non-contradiction: its hand-maintained provenance line named skillset 670f7f1, seven commits behind the ARG and itself the commit that told agents to hand-stamp added_by — the withdrawn instruction this work exists to stop shipping — while its cp recipe contradicted the "not cp" rule 20 lines above. Line removed (nothing forced it to move when the ARGs did); 670f7f1 kept only as a labelled cautionary example. The pi-extensions half was verified redundant (CI require_sha resolves PI_EXTENSIONS_REF) before removal. SHOULD-FIXES: `<root> --check`, the spelling VENDORED.md documented, silently ran a REFRESH because only $1 was parsed (both tools now parse all args and reject unknown ones); refresh at a detached/older HEAD silently rewound ref and bytes (now refused unless the recorded ref is an ancestor, --force to override); upstream_dirty was computed and never used in check mode; --no-skills --json printed human text and broke jq; --help was a hardcoded sed range this branch had already made stale; the fingerprint hashed SKILL.md alone so a live skill differing only in a sibling file reported "identical", and pi-extensions already ships two files, so it is now a per-skill TREE hash with the manifest field renamed skillset_snapshot_tree_sha256; the --no-skills smoke assertion was negative-only and passed on a crashed binary. mktemp+mv left files 0600 — CI was unaffected since the index records 100644, so the blast radius was local builds only, narrower than the review inferred. Snapshot resynced c04cd15 -> 5fd0d5c so the no-clone fallback carries the CORRECTED coordination protocol rather than the withdrawn one; --check is now OK with no staleness notice, and the bidirectional canary re-verified against the new bytes. Local validation is bash -n only (shellcheck, hadolint and actionlint are all absent in this container) — CI remains the shellcheck gate.	2026-08-26 14:38:07 +02:00
joakimp	49a6534093	docs: write down the coordination channel the fleet already runs on ... The logstream has carried cross-machine work since 2026-08-18 — patch handoff, review, a v1->v2 supersede — and nothing in this repo said it existed. That gap had a measurable cost this morning: another host addressed a retraction to pi@tor-ms22 by name and it was read only because the human said "read the logstream", while the agent was actively rebuilding the thing it warned about. Split by what each document is authoritative for, so there is one copy of each claim rather than three that drift: - README § Cross-machine agent coordination — what the CONTAINER needs. MEMPALACE_REMOTE_URL selects the shared palace; MEMPALACE_PI_DEVICE is what makes this machine reachable, because where every host is a thin client of one palace the stamped agent name is the only thing that distinguishes them. Stated as a rule with teeth: set both or neither, since a container missing the device var can read the log but is addressable by nobody. - AGENTS.md release checklist step 2 — the vendored-snapshot refresh, as a MECHANISM in the document a releasing agent actually reads, not a comment hoping to be noticed. It says the refresh costs a base rebuild, that skipping it is legitimate (every enrolled host reads its live clone), and that skipping it silently is not. - CHANGELOG — the three-way split itself, plus the measurement that shaped the ack contract: unfiltered, the mailbox returned 5 events, 4 of them finished broadcasts from eight days earlier; with status="open", exactly the 1 that needed an answer. Norms live in the skillset skill (82a8d3c, already live on every host that mounts the skillset — no rebuild) and mechanism in mempalace-toolkit's extensions/pi/README.md (e70bef2, which also documents the edge stamper that 553d8657 shipped undocumented). Deliberately NOT duplicated here. Consequence recorded rather than hidden: the skill edit lands in the skillset, so this repo's SKILLSET_SNAPSHOT_REF now honestly reports itself behind, and --check exits 1 with "has moved to 82a8d3c; the snapshot describes the older c04cd15". That message is also fixed in this commit — it previously blamed "the working tree" even when the tree was clean and only the ref had moved, which is the same defect class as a canary pinned to a phrase the release deleted: a message that names the wrong cause. Now distinguishes moved-HEAD from dirty-tree, verified against both plus the in-sync case.	2026-08-26 12:51:26 +02:00
joakimp	e070e0bcbf	skills: record the vendored snapshot's provenance, and report which copy wins ... Found while verifying v1.8.7 from inside a fresh container: the baked mempalace snapshot is read by no host on this fleet. devbox-skill-reconcile repoints ~/.agents/skills/mempalace at the mounted live clone (the v1.8.5 fix working as designed), and all four compose stacks mount a workspace containing the skillset. So the phrase canary that blocked v1.8.7's first tag polices a file nobody opens, while the drift that could actually mislead an agent — a git pull nobody ran in /workspace/skillset — was invisible from inside the container and is invisible to CI by construction. Record provenance instead of policing it, and move the check to where the skillset actually is: - Dockerfile.variant: ARG SKILLSET_SNAPSHOT_REF (the claim) + a sha256 of the shipped bytes measured in the manifest layer (the fact), as manifest siblings rather than components{} members, plus an OCI label. An ARG default, not a CI-resolved output: no credential for the private skillset, no change at any of the four variant build call sites, and a local docker build records what CI does. Variant-only, so no base rebuild — check-base-hash.sh scans Dockerfile.base alone, verified by running it. - pi-devbox-version: a skills: section naming baked vs live <repo> @ <sha> per vendored skill, and for mempalace whether the live copy is identical to the baked fingerprint, at the same commit with uncommitted edits, or divergent. entrypoint-user.sh passes the new --no-skills, because the banner prints before the links exist and long before the reconcile runs. - scripts/vendor-mempalace-skill.sh: refresh the file and rewrite the ref together (a cp without an ARG bump makes the manifest lie, which is worse than anonymity); --check verifies the claim against a real clone. - 5 new smoke assertions (78 -> 83), mutation-tested through the real sh -c path: 6 fabricated manifests, where a well-formed hash of the wrong file proves the two manifest assertions are not redundant; the all-baked reporting test verified to FAIL against a live-skillset environment. Reviewed mid-flight by pi@emb-7kj4vr4g over the logstream (correlation skillset-vendor-drift), which retracted its own earlier recommendation of a build-time byte-compare against skillset HEAD and supplied the better framing: the invariant is NON-CONTRADICTION, not currency. Byte parity on a fallback would have cost a resync commit plus a ~67-min base rebuild for each of the four skillset commits pushed in one evening. Its warning also found a real bug here: the script now CONSTRUCTS the snapshot from `git show HEAD:<path>` instead of copying the working tree, because a clean `git diff` says nothing about an untracked file — the one input the first draft would have recorded a false ref for. Tested: untracked, unstaged and staged-but-uncommitted all refuse, atomically. Also fixes three stale in-repo markers of the same class the canary belongs to (true when written, silently false at release): two dangling "Unreleased" pointers and a typst line still marked Unreleased five releases after v1.4.0.	2026-08-26 10:30:27 +02:00