plugins:check reported "2 commit(s) NOT PUSHED" for all twenty-one installed
plugins on a machine where nothing had been committed. the check was right about
what it measured and the cause was here.
`git fetch origin HEAD` writes FETCH_HEAD and nothing else. refs/remotes/origin/
<branch> keeps whatever it had, so after a successful pull the checkout sits at
the newest commit while origin/master still points at an older one — and every
`rev-list origin/master...HEAD` reports the checkout as ahead by however many
commits it just pulled.
so the remote-tracking ref is refreshed too, explicitly, after the fetch that
cannot do it. best effort, because the local branch may not exist on the remote
under that name — which is the same reason the fetch asks for HEAD rather than
for a branch.
fetch also asks for --tags now. tags are how releaseState decides whether there
is anything to update to, so a fetch that skipped them left the Update button
answering from refs older than the release it was offering.
verified by staling a ref on purpose: one false positive before, none after a
single pullPlugin.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Officer-Session: 656f5c85-e49a-4f1f-b9f3-042a04b4d043
"update" was `git pull` and re-install, unconditionally, for every plugin.
nothing could say whether there was anything to pull, so the button was always
there and usually did nothing — and "update all" was twenty-one no-ops with a
spinner on it. the button's own comment admitted it: gating on `outdated` would
hide it for ever, because nothing bumped a version.
versions are dated and tagged now, so the rule the owner asked for is possible:
· a checkout NOT at a tag is always updateable — it is between releases, no
claim is being made about it, pulling is always reasonable
· a checkout AT a tag is updateable only when a NEWER tag exists
the part worth defending is how "newer" is decided. the obvious version-string
comparison is wrong the first time a plugin is tagged `v2` or `1.0.0-rc1`, and
wrong SILENTLY — a plugin that never offers an update looks like one nobody has
released. so newness is asked of git: the newest tag reachable from the REMOTE
branch, compared against the tag at HEAD. that holds for any names anyone
chooses, and there is a test with a tag called `beta` that sorts before `v1` to
keep it honest.
it never fetches. every answer comes from refs already on disk, because this
runs once per plugin on a request that renders a list and twenty-one network
round trips would make the screen feel broken. tags arrive at clone and at the
fetch `pullPlugin` already does.
the VERB refuses too, not just the UI. a plugins list is fetched once and a tag
can be pushed a second later, so the copy someone clicks is routinely older than
the truth — and `updateAll` iterates a list rather than asking per plugin.
"up to date · <tag>" is said out loud rather than shown as an absent button. no
button and up-to-date look identical, and only one of them is information.
verified on the real installs: example pulled to its tag and flipped to
up-to-date, caldav on an older commit stayed updateable, and updatePlugin on
example answered "already at 2026.08.27.01, the newest release" without pulling.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Officer-Session: 656f5c85-e49a-4f1f-b9f3-042a04b4d043
A disabled plugin keeps its directory, and the directory is what the next start runs. The longer it
stays off the more certainly it is stale, and enabling would quietly run whatever was current on the
day it was switched off — with every step reporting success, which is exactly how the jellyfin
install on alpha re-applied a two-day-old checkout.
Deleting no longer has that problem, since it takes the directory with it and installing is always a
fresh clone. That left disable/enable as the one remaining way to run old code without being told.
The pull is best-effort and the enable is not. `updatePlugin` returns ok:false when a pull is
refused, and it is refused for reasons that say nothing about whether the plugin can run: a dirty
working tree — every plugin directory on this machine is one — an unreachable forge, or a directory
copied in rather than cloned. Enable is the reversible half of a pair with disable, and a switch that
will not turn back on because a network is down is worse than one running last week's code. So the
refresh reports which of those happened and the enable proceeds regardless; a re-apply that fails
falls back to the code already on disk, which was running before it was disabled.
Tested by the refusal path rather than the happy one: a directory that is not a checkout comes back
having reported "not refreshed", and the error that surfaces is about not being installed rather than
about git — which is only possible if the refusal was stepped past instead of returned.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The Update button failed with "couldn't find remote ref main" on every checkout
made before the plugin repositories were standardised on `master`. It pulled
`origin <local branch name>`, and the local branch and the remote's default had
stopped agreeing — so the button could never work again on exactly the installs
that most needed it.
Now `git fetch origin HEAD` and a fast-forward: HEAD resolves to whatever the
remote's default is, so the local name stops mattering, and the merge applies it
to whichever branch the checkout happens to be on.
Fourth time today that naming a branch was the bug — the marketplace icon URLs,
the capabilities sync, the setup script, and now this. The rule that keeps
holding: fetch HEAD, never a name.
Verified by reproducing it — renamed a real checkout to `main`, pulled against a
remote that has only `master`, and it succeeded.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The plugin and capabilities repositories were standardised on `master`, and
five places said `origin main` — the setup script's sync and the Update-all
path. Swapping them to `master` would be the same mistake wearing a new name.
`HEAD` resolves to whatever the remote's default is, so the question stops
being asked, exactly as it now does for the marketplace icon URLs. Only the
LOCAL branch still needs a name.
Third time today that naming a branch was the bug: the icon URLs 404'd on four
repositories created as `master`, and these would have broken the moment the
rest were renamed to match.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
capabilities/ is the file-based item store, and most of it belongs to the
owner: the six item directories are created by the platform at boot and
extensions/tool-loader is written from platform source, so neither is tracked
anywhere. What IS tracked is the small set the platform ships — today one
affordance, telling an agent that markdown images render and that the USER'S
DEVICE fetches the URL, which it cannot discover from the filesystem.
That now lives in officerdev/capabilities, public so a fresh install can clone
it without credentials.
Two ways in. The setup script syncs it during the layout step — non-fatal, and
it says what an install without it costs rather than failing: agents go back to
guessing, which is what they did before this existed. And "Update all" on the
marketplace screen carries it alongside the plugins, because it is the same
question — get me what has been published since I installed — and a second
different gesture for it is one nobody remembers.
Three states in both places, and the third is the normal one on an existing
machine: a checkout is pulled, an empty directory is cloned into, and a
directory that already holds the platform's generated items gets a repository
initialised around them. UNTRACKED files never block a pull, because the
owner's own skills and tools living here is the ordinary state — only tracked
changes do.
`cloned` and `adopted` are reported in the UI where `pulled` is not: they mean
this machine had no affordances at all until the button was pressed.
Verified against the real checkout: sync reports pulled, and the loader finds
officer/core/image-rendering afterwards.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
There was no update path. fetchPlugin REFUSES an existing directory — cloning
over one is how uncommitted work disappears — so install was a one-way door,
and the answer to "my plugin changed" was uninstall and reinstall, which drops
its tables on the way past.
An update is a git pull and then the ORDINARY install path. installPlugin
already skips the clone when the directory is present and re-runs everything
else: os dependencies, schema push, assets, the ecosystem entry, the sidecar,
the remount and the frontend rebuild. So there is no second implementation of
"apply a plugin" here to drift from the first.
Two refusals, both about not destroying work. A dirty working tree is refused
rather than stashed or force-pulled — every plugin directory on a developer's
machine is a live checkout, and this repository's own are edited in place.
Non-fast-forward is refused for the same reason: a diverged local commit is
somebody's work and merging it automatically is not the platform's decision.
The per-plugin button replaces one that was quietly broken: it appeared only
when `outdated` and called `install`, which cannot fetch, so it re-applied
stale code. Nothing bumps a version today either, so with everything pinned at
1.0.0 that flag never fires and the button never appeared. Now always offered,
and it pulls.
Update-all is a plain POST rather than the streaming door: twelve interleaved
step streams is not a readable log, and the useful answer is the summary. It
runs sequentially — each update pushes schema, republishes assets, rewrites the
ecosystem file and rebuilds the frontend, and two of those at once is a race
over one file each. One failure does not stop the rest, and failures are named
with their reason, because "2 failed" sends someone to the terminal.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>