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>
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