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All four pre-date U4 and sit in files it touched, which is why a diff-scoped robustness lens saw them. They are separated from the unit's own commit so the feature history stays readable; the release tags both. * A booth name reached a JS string context. The confirm dialogs interpolated the name into a string literal inside `onsubmit`. Jinja's autoescape is HTML-attribute escaping, not JS-string escaping: the browser decodes the entity back to a quote before the JS parser sees it, so a name crafted to close the string executed on submit. Booth names are agent-authored — making a folder under the data dir is the whole API — so this was a live path, not a theoretical one. The name now travels as a data attribute to a delegated handler, where escaping is escaping. * An unreadable `links.md` returned 500 for the whole booth page. `is_file()` then an unguarded `read_text()`. The board is one tile on that page, and a page that will not load is worse than one missing a tile — the posture `read_blurred`, `marks_for` and `read_manifest` already take. * The index order had no tie-breaker, which violates the deterministic-order invariant. Equal-mtime booths fell back to whatever `iterdir()` yielded, and two booths landed by one `rsync` batch share an mtime exactly. Now `(mtime, name)` reverse: newest first, then name. The operator refers to cards positionally, so a sequence that moves between renders misfiles his judgment rather than crashing. * `/b/<n>/marks.json` reported damage as empty success. `booth marks` exits 3 on an unreadable file precisely so a caller can tell "not yet" from "broken"; the HTTP mirror — the only reader a remote session has — returned the same empty list for both. It now carries `error` and `detail`. The status stays 200 deliberately: reads are lenient here, and a pinned status code is a promise to remote clients this fix has no business breaking. Each has a regression test. 410 tests.
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The Booth — roadmap
Design: docs/design/information-architecture.md.
Current version: 0.4.0 (U1, U2, U4 and U5 landed; extracted from eshpfi 2026-09-21).
v1 target
What must be true to cut 1.0. Seven capabilities, each closing a measured defect — not a wish. The measurements are in the IA doc.
| # | capability | closes | unit |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | ce598b3 |
captions never reach the zoom view (never sent, not lost) | U1 |
| 2 | c7f9437, released v0.2.0 |
5 mechanisms for 1 job; operator→session loop runs through chat | U2 |
| 3 | Declared embed seam — /_booth/embed.js, chrome mounts via DOM |
6 regexes injected into arbitrary author HTML, load-bearing for asks | U3 |
| 4 | c3a97c1, released v0.4.0 |
70% of booths on the .forever escape hatch (54% when first counted) |
U4 |
| 5 | c015a91, released v0.3.0 |
job 5 had no home, so it lived on the link board as 145 dead rows | U5 |
| 6 | Benches — registry, identity, enforced rule, migration | 69% link-board rot; the same bench posted 5× | U6 |
| 7 | Navigation at 270 items — sections, rail, filters, grid keyboard | one flat wall; subfolder structure discarded at render | U7 |
Ordering is dependency-driven, not priority-driven: U1 → U2 → {U3, U4, U5} → U7, with U6 independent of all of them (different storage, different surface) and therefore the safest thing to land first or in parallel.
U1, U2, U4 and U5 are landed. U3 is unblocked and unstarted; U6 remains independent and unstarted; U7 waits on the rest.
U5's adoption is a measured prediction, not a finished result, and it is
TWO predictions rather than one. The operator declined a fleetwide announcement
so that adoption could be told apart from design; within fifty minutes of the
deploy a peer that had been told nothing (comfy-dev) created a booth and it
announced itself with a handle and an empty why. That is the split:
- The handle rides for free. It is written by
booth newandbooth add, so every existing caller starts announcing without learning anything. - The
whyhas to be learned. It needs someone to know the flag exists.
Both get re-measured on 2026-09-29:
find ~/booth-data -maxdepth 2 -name .booth.json | wc -l # free
grep -l '"why": "[^"]' ~/booth-data/*/.booth.json | wc -l # learned
A high first count with a near-zero second is the predicted shape of "nobody was
told" — an adoption failure fixed by announcing, which is a different thing from
nobody wanting it. Same instrument as U4's .forever prediction below.
Cross-cutting invariant — deterministic order, everywhere
Every ordered collection the Booth renders must have a stated, deterministic order. Not "usually stable", not "whatever the filesystem yields" — a rule someone can name, that produces the same sequence on every render of the same state. The rule itself is free to be anything defensible: byte order over a path, creation time, an explicit number, even an arbitrary-but-recorded sequence. What is forbidden is no rule.
This matters more here than in most services because the Booth's whole job is
comparison. The operator is judging pancake-v3-full against
pancake-v4-full, tile 47 against tile 47. If the order shifts between two page
loads — or differs between the gallery, the zoom ring, the zip manifest and the
marks read — then every positional reference the operator makes ("the third
one from the left", "the one after the banded one") is silently wrong, and a
flag or a note lands on the wrong artifact. Non-determinism does not present as
a bug report; it presents as the operator's judgment being quietly misfiled.
Where it already binds, and what the rule is in each case:
| collection | rule |
|---|---|
| items in a booth | sorted(rel) — byte order over the booth-relative path (U1 INV-3) |
| the zoom prev/next ring | the item order, filtered to images — same sequence, one source |
| caption sidecar resolution | sorted scan, so two media files sharing a stem resolve the same way every time (a real non-determinism U1 removed) |
| marks in a booth | (created, id) — time, with the id as tie-break so two marks written in the same second cannot swap |
| legacy ask import | (mtime, name), which is the order list_asks gave them |
| link board rows | pinned first, then newest-first |
| a booth's announcement | not a collection — one flat record per booth, nothing to order (U5) |
U4 added no ordered collection — a booth's lifetime is one state per booth, not a sequence — so the rule above did not need a new row. The three lifetime surfaces (index card, booth header, marks page) render through ONE macro precisely so they cannot disagree, which is the same property stated for ordering: one rule, one place, every surface reading it.
Where it is still to be decided, and must be before the unit ships: U7's section ordering and its compare pairing (sections need a stated order among themselves, not just within; pairing by filename needs a rule for what happens to an unpaired file), and U6's bench listing.
The test for any new ordered surface: can you write the rule down in one line? If not, it does not have one yet.
Explicitly NOT in v1
- Backward compatibility with the
askCLI verbs. Pre-1.0, andask/asks/answerbecome thin aliases overmarksrather than a second code path. The 17 consuming handles get one althing note naming the change — the one case where telling peers is real coordination and not a broadcast. - A migration that deletes anything.
links.mdis archived verbatim and committed before the registry is seeded from it.
Parking lot
Deferred with a home, per the anti-creep gate. Default is park; these were weighed against the v1 path and lost on purpose.
| item | why parked |
|---|---|
| Compare mode — pair-by-name A/B across subfolders | The best idea in the set, and the only one that is a new capability rather than a fix for a measured defect. The four-booth pancake-v3/v4 dance still works. First thing in v1.1. |
| Virtualized / progressive grid loading | Speculative. 270 <img loading="lazy"> may be fine. Measure the real booth before optimising it — if it renders inside a second, this is invented work. |
| Bench uptime history + graphs | The v1 need is "is it dead", which one flag answers. A time series is a different product. |
| Cross-booth search | No evidence of the need in the usage data. |
| Per-viewer state (who has seen what) | The Booth has one viewer. Revisit if that stops being true. |
| Auth | Standing non-goal. LAN/mesh-internal. Blur stays cosmetic and says so. |
Post-v1, already committed
- SVOS theme retrofit by
design-dev. Runs as a parallel track, not a v1 gate: we own the information architecture (it is driven by the measurement above), design-dev owns the visual and interaction system. The handoff is a/vor-uibrief written against the landed v1 structure — the same shapehamr-devandpewpew-devused.
Gate
A proposed feature is on the v1 path or it is parked. Default: parked. When both are defensible, park it — same asymmetry as the patch-default in SemVer. Applies regardless of who proposed it.