The Windows build launched, printed help, drew the specimen card, and showed a
menu containing one item: Quit. Not a permissions problem and nothing to do with
Bluetooth — the tools were simply not in the bundle.
`meshterm/tools/__init__.py` finds every tool with `pkgutil.iter_modules` and
imports it so its `@register` decorator fires. Nothing static ever names a tool
module, so PyInstaller had no reason to include one, and the registry came up
empty: no menu entries, no CLI subcommands, an app that starts and does nothing.
`collect_submodules("meshterm.tools")` fixes it, which is the same treatment
`bleak.backends` already had for the same reason — the spec knew about other
people's dynamic imports and not about ours.
The worse half is that CI said this was fine. The smoke test ran `--help` and
`specimen`, and a build with no tools at all passes both. It now runs a
tool-provided subcommand, so an empty registry fails the pipeline instead of
reaching a release page. Green tests that cannot see the defect are worse than no
tests, because they are believed.
`MESHTERM_HOME` comes out of the same session. Every copy of MeshTerm reads and
writes `~/.meshterm`, so trying a downloaded build meant pointing it at the same
34MB history database as the checkout it was built from, with no way to keep them
apart. The variable moves the whole directory. An empty or whitespace value falls
back rather than resolving to the current directory, because a shell exporting it
blank is common and scattering someone's history into their downloads folder is a
poor way to find that out.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
`macos-13` is retired. GitHub's image list starts at macOS 14 now, and the
current x86_64 labels are `macos-15-intel` and `macos-26-intel`.
The failure mode is worth writing down, because it is not the one you would
expect: a job asking for a retired label does not fail. It queues, forever,
and holds the entire run open behind it — so the four legs that had already
built sat there under a run that never finished, and anything waiting on that
workflow would have waited with them. That includes the release workflow, which
calls it, so a tag pushed today would have produced no release and no error to
explain why.
`macos-15-intel` rather than `-26-intel`, for the same reason the Python in this
matrix is 3.10: built against an older system, runs on more machines.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Pushing a version tag now builds the binaries and puts them on the Releases page,
with a combined SHA256SUMS and notes lifted out of the changelog section for that
version. It stays inside GitHub — while the repository is private the release is
private too — and it is emphatically not the PyPI publish, which is `release.yml`
and still needs a person to run it on purpose.
`installers.yml` gained a `workflow_call` trigger so the release calls it instead
of keeping a second copy of the matrix. Two matrices would agree for about a month
and then quietly stop, and the files people download should be built exactly the
way the ones CI checks on every push are.
The README now leads its install section with the download rather than with pip,
because most people who want MeshTerm have a radio and a terminal and not a Python
toolchain. It also says plainly that the first launch will be blocked: these builds
are unsigned, macOS will refuse them until the quarantine attribute is cleared, and
Windows will show its SmartScreen warning. Signing costs real money on both
platforms, so the honest move is to say so and give people the checksum file rather
than let them think something is wrong.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The first CI run went red on `ruff format --check`, on a tree that was clean on
this machine. Three separate problems, all found by pushing.
`ruff>=0.4` is not a pin. CI installed 0.16.6 where the laptop had 0.15.18, and
0.16 formats Python code blocks inside Markdown while 0.15 leaves them alone — so
the two disagreed about whether the repository was formatted, which is the one
thing a formatter exists to settle. Pinned to the 0.16 line. Dependabot will
offer the next one, and CI will say whether it is safe.
The file it tripped over is `docs/survey-ui-consistency.md`, which quotes four
lines of a dialog call as it looked on 22 August. That excerpt is a fragment —
two arguments, no call around them — so the formatter parsed it as two statements
and rewrote them into a tuple and an assignment that never existed anywhere. The
surveys are dated records of a past state, so `docs/` is now excluded: a
formatter editing a quotation is not tidying, it is falsifying.
And the installer workflow was firing for branches it had no business building.
Dependabot opened three action bumps within a minute of the push; each one edits
`.github/workflows/installers.yml`, each matched its own path filter, and each
started a five-platform build. `branches: [main]` stops it.
Everything else was green on the first try, including the part that was actually
uncertain: all seven test legs passed, macOS among them, and the installers built
on Windows, macOS on Apple silicon, and Linux on both x64 and arm64 — so the
uConsole build works and the ARM runner was available after all.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Most people who want MeshTerm have a radio and a terminal, not a Python
toolchain. This is the install for them: one file, download it, run it.
`packaging/meshterm.spec` freezes the app with PyInstaller in console mode —
which is not a detail, since a windowed build of a terminal program starts with
nowhere to draw and exits. The assets land at `meshterm/assets` inside the bundle
so that `Path(__file__).parent.parent / "assets"` keeps resolving exactly as it
does in a checkout, and bleak's per-platform backends are named as hidden imports
because nothing static ever sees the one that actually gets used. UPX is off: a
few megabytes are not worth being flagged by antivirus on a first release.
The build was run here rather than only written. The Windows executable comes out
at 14 MB, runs from a directory with no source tree in sight, and draws the
specimen card — which is the real test, because the specimen reads the asset
files.
`installers.yml` does the same on five machines, because frozen builds cannot be
cross-compiled. Windows, macOS on both Apple silicon and Intel (plenty of people
still have one, and an arm64 build will not run for them), and Linux on x64 and
ARM64 — the last for the uConsole. Each leg runs the binary from a temporary
directory before uploading it, so a build that only works beside its own source
fails on the runner instead of on somebody's laptop, and each one gets a checksum
written beside it. It publishes nothing; attaching these to a release stays a
separate decision.
Also here: `meshterm --help` now opens with the same sentence as the package
summary, rather than a fourth description of the project written in its own way.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Jean-Pierre MartineauandClaude Opus 5