meshbay.git/packaging, branch 0.17

fix(hub): the admin allow-list grants an account, not a username

2026-09-30T10:37:31Z

Each name in admin_usernames is pinned to the first active account seen holding it (admin_pins), so a name freed by a deletion grants nothing. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5

refactor: remove the unused GroupIndex.serialize chain

2026-09-28T14:24:12Z

serialize/deserialize had no production caller, and took with them the per-chunk signature, the ChaCha20 cipher variant and the zstandard dependency. Key derivations are unchanged. Docs corrected, including design §4.3's claim that chunks are compressed. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5

docs: the Windows node's three modes and one lifecycle, and what it cost

2026-09-27T20:21:42Z

- MESHBAY_DESIGN.md §11.2: the node runs only while the app is open, at sign-in, or as a boot-time service; starting and stopping have one implementation, the CLI's; a second instance refuses before it writes anything the running one depends on. - packaging/win/README.md: the three modes, switching between them, upgrading a running node, where the log is, the service task's settings. - docs/windows-build.md: the build's smoke start of the frozen daemon, the log location, and what an upgrade does to a running node. - CLAUDE.md: four engineering lessons -- an upgrade that cannot stop the node installs around it; on Windows the CLI is the process it is stopping; a second instance must fail before it touches anything shared; a test that redirects HOME isolates nothing on Windows. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5

fix: Windows installer and desktop app start and stop the node one way

2026-09-27T20:20:53Z

A 0.16 upgrade in service mode left the previous node running: setup's unelevated taskkill cannot reach session 0, and it ran in customInstall, which electron-builder inserts after the files are copied. The locked exe was not replaced, and the new app talked to the old node ("started but could not link", "No operator paired"). Installer (build/installer.nsh, build/stop-node.ps1): - customCheckAppRunning, which runs before uninstallOldVersion and extraction, stops the node with an embedded stop-node.ps1: control API, then schtasks /end, then Stop-Process, and refuses to half-upgrade if one survives. - An upgrade keeps the mode it finds (task, launcher, previous install), restores the sign-in launcher the old uninstaller deletes, and restarts the node the way that mode runs it. A silent upgrade of an "at sign-in" install used to end with no autostart and no node. - The uninstaller removes the task and firewall rules only on a real uninstall, not on an update. Desktop app (src/main.js): - Start, Stop, Restart and node:start go through the CLI's lifecycle verbs instead of a second implementation; a child spawned by Electron also held Electron's sockets after the app quit. - "Only while MeshBay is open" is a real mode: the app starts a provisioned node at launch and stops the one it started when it quits. - Switching modes stops the node first -- deleting a task does not end its instance, and a new service found the port taken -- keeps the firewall rules every mode needs, and starts the node again. A declined or unanswered UAC prompt restores the node instead of leaving it stopped, and says that nothing changed. - waiting_for_hub counts as a node that is up; linking waits for a node that answers, with a longer deadline, and reports a version mismatch. Packaging (packaging/win): - The service task gets no 72-hour limit, runs on battery and ignores a second start; service.ps1 status reports a stale registration so setup re-registers it; remove ends the running instance before deleting the task. - build-node-runtime.ps1 starts the frozen daemon in a throwaway profile (smoke-node-runtime.ps1) instead of only asking for --help. The mode that was "Off (start manually)" is labelled "Only while MeshBay is open" in all ten catalogues. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5

fix(node): read the packaged TMDB token in place

2026-09-26T10:23:16Z

A node onboarded by the desktop client never ran `init`, so default.env was never copied to node.env; and default.env was 0600 root, unreadable to a per-user node anyway. The daemon now loads it beneath node.env, 0644. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5

fix(hub): an invitation no longer holds back its invitee's sign-up code

2026-09-23T17:01:37Z

The per-recipient cooldown was shared by every purpose, so the code a person asked for by registering within two minutes of an invitation link was refused, silently. The cooldown is now per family (invitations vs the account's own steps); the daily cap still counts everything. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5

feat(hub): invitation-link tickets bound to a verified address

2026-09-23T15:46:48Z

group_invite_links holds sha256(ticket) and the invitee's address blind index; redeeming grants membership to that account only. Owner-only create/list/cancel (a node token may create, never mail), 20 outstanding per group, optional mail written by the hub itself and capped at 10 per sender per day (mail.invite_link_daily_cap). MESHBAY_DESIGN.md §3.4 now carries the whole link design. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5

docs: cite MESHBAY_DESIGN.md and a section instead of the merged notes

2026-09-19T00:12:47Z

The per-feature design notes were merged into docs/MESHBAY_DESIGN.md and deleted from the tree on 2026-09-11, but ~230 comments across the three packages still named them — usually written `docs/musicbay.md §3.2`, as though the file were still in docs/. A reader had to know §16 existed to resolve any of them. They now name the section directly. Every mapping comes from §16, the concordance, which already records where each old section landed: musicbay -> §9.8, mediacenter -> §9.7 for the Videos app and §6.5 where the subject is derived data, photos -> §9.9, auth-confirm -> §3.6, refactoring-search -> §9.11, invite-pairing-v1 -> §3.4, per-node-identity-v1 -> §3.2, captcha -> §7.7, chat-sender-keys -> §4.5, apps/refactor-groups -> §9.1–§9.4, desktop-client-v1 per section. Bare citations of the same documents (`draft-v6 §2.11`, `§4.8`, `§3.4`) are retargeted too: those collide with real section numbers in the design document, so leaving them would have been worse than the named form. Four cases the concordance does not cover, each decided rather than guessed: Sub-item references into documents that no longer exist — mediacenter's `§3.3 row 4`, `§3.4b/c`, `apps.md §3b` — name rows and sub-items §9.7 and §9.2 do not reproduce. The module-level citation stays; the sub-item pointer is dropped. The V-findings keep their labels but lose the dead `§10.1/` prefix. §13.8 lists V1–V13 as per-application open items, which is not what the labels mean in these comments, so pointing them at §13.8 would have been a false citation. `apps.md §5`'s virtualization requirement has no counterpart anywhere in the design document. The requirement is stated in the comment itself, so the citation is dropped rather than aimed at a section that does not say it. Comments that attributed a *sentence* to an old note — musicbay's "several thousand files" example, its "what got measured" note, its measured ~11%/~26% cover-art figures, the "original no root, whole shared tree" call — state the fact without attribution now. §9.8 does not contain those sentences and citing it for them would have been wrong. CLAUDE.md's "a reference to a document that no longer exists" row now says the concordance is for git history and out-of-tree material; the code cites sections directly. Verified: 2851 passed, 4 skipped. The 12 errors in the run are the Firefox leg of test_sticky_header.py's browser harness, which is broken at the browser level on this machine — headless Firefox (snap) dies with `[GFX1-]: RenderCompositorSWGL failed mapping default framebuffer`, renders nothing, and the probe exits `{"error": "no measurement"}` after its full 90s wait. Chrome runs the same 12 assertions in 3.2s and passes. Nothing here can affect it: every changed line in style.css is inside a comment. Also checked: ast.parse on every changed .py, `node --check` on every changed .js, the /* */ balance in style.css, and that no changed line exceeds the width its file already used. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5

docs: drop the references to design notes that live outside the repo

2026-09-18T23:15:53Z

Seventeen comments across the Windows packaging targets pointed at C:\Users\admin\devel\light-client.md and msix-installer.md -- absolute paths on one developer's machine, unreadable to anyone else who clones this repository and unverifiable by any test here. The surrounding prose already carried the substance in every case, so these are removals, not rewrites, with two exceptions where the pointer was doing real work: electron-builder.msix.yml's header told the reader to go read §4 and §8 first. It now states the fact directly (an AppX/MSIX install never elevates, by design, so the package carries none of installer.nsh's elevation logic) and says the open items are called out at each declaration below -- which they already were, at `capabilities` and `customExtensionsPath`. The two "msix-installer.md §8" citations become "an open item" / "the other open item", beside the description of the item that was already there. Paragraphs the removals left ragged are re-wrapped. Verified: node suite 1403 pass / 4 skip (71 of them test_packaging_win.py), both electron-builder configs still parse as YAML, node --check on main.js. The .ps1 edits are inside <# #> comment headers plus one deleted Write-Host in a block that keeps two others; no pwsh on this machine to parse them. Not touched, and much larger: ~230 comments elsewhere in the codebase cite per-feature design notes (musicbay.md, mediacenter.md, auth-confirm.md and twenty more) that were merged into docs/MESHBAY_DESIGN.md. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5

feat: decode and re-encode video on the GPU where there is one

2026-09-18T12:37:08Z

A 1080p film is decoded by whoever watches it and re-encoded by the node when no browser can decode the source. Both were on the CPU, and on an Atom or Celeron mini-PC neither reaches real time — which is what `transcode_incompatible_video` exists to refuse. This adds the mechanism that makes refusing it unnecessary. Node — `hwaccel.py`: VA-API on Linux, Quick Sync or NVENC on Windows, established by encoding 1080p and reading the file back with ffprobe. Nothing is accepted that does not produce the exact profile and level `stream_init` announces, since the client checks that string before it trusts a byte: an encoder that wrote another level would make the node's own codec string a lie, and ffmpeg takes `-level 4.1` and `-level 41` from h264_qsv without saying which it understood. Three modes per stream — hardware decode and encode, hardware encode alone, libx264 — demoted per source codec, because a GPU that decodes HEVC may have no decoder for MPEG-4 Part 2 and only asking it finds out. A mode that fails is detected on an empty stdout before `stream_init` goes out, so the viewer sees one working stream and never an error. Client — Chromium ships VA-API off on Linux. It is enabled where a render node and a driver are present, then verified through `navigator.mediaCapabilities`: a no moves to the next GL backend on the next launch and an exhausted list drops the switches, so a renamed feature cannot pass for a feature that is on and `--ignore-gpu-blocklist` cannot survive on a machine it did not help. Feature lists now merge rather than overwrite — `appendSwitch` replaces the value, and a second caller would have silently cancelled the mDNS switch aiortc depends on. Packaging — the drivers are weak dependencies on all four formats, so a machine without a GPU installs exactly as before. `dpkg -i` and `rpm -ivh` ignore weak deps; `packaging/README.md` now says so. Windows needs no driver: the bundled ffmpeg already carries h264_qsv and h264_nvenc, and a re-pin that dropped them would cost every low-power Windows node its hardware encoding silently. AMD on Windows (AMF) and macOS (VideoToolbox) are named gaps, not oversights: neither could be tried anywhere in this project, and both re-encode in software as before. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5