Beside the three navigation paragraphs, since it is the fourth thing the shell states about where the user can go. Two notes are measured facts rather than design: a default expressed as an *absent key* survives an existing seed, where one expressed as a zero value does not; and a spec can no longer assume a destination has a nav item.
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CLAUDE.md
This file provides guidance to Claude Code (claude.ai/code) when working with code in this repository.
Project
YellowJacket is a cross-platform desktop music player built with Go (backend) and TypeScript/Lit (frontend), using the Wails framework to bridge them. It supports MP3, FLAC, OGG Vorbis, and WAV playback.
Issues
The tracker is the source of truth for what is wanted and what is
already being worked on, and it is shared with a collaborator who
cannot see this session. scripts/issue.sh is the whole interface to
it (list, mine, search, show, new, claim, unclaim,
comment, close, label, depends, labels); it needs a
GITEA_TOKEN with write:issue.
Search the tracker before starting any work, and claim what you
find. Fifty-odd issues make that a real lookup rather than a
formality. ./scripts/issue.sh search <terms> covers open and closed —
closed matters, because "that was fixed three weeks ago" is the
cheapest possible answer.
Claiming happens before the first edit, not before the commit. The
whole point is that the collaborator can see the work is taken while
it is being done, so claim sets the assignee, applies
Status/In Progress and posts a comment naming the branch and the
approach — all three, or none. It refuses outright if somebody else
already holds it, and that refusal is the feature: talk to them rather
than working around it.
If no issue covers the work, open one first. The issue exists before the branch does. That is what makes the tracker a description of the project rather than a description of the past.
Findings get filed. A bug tripped over while doing something else is an issue with a reproduction, not a sentence in a chat message nobody can search. So is a piece of work deliberately not done — the issue is where "we decided not to, and here is why" survives.
Four conventions are already established and are not up for reinvention:
- The labels are a taxonomy, not tags:
Kind/*,Area/*,Priority/*,Platform/*, plusReviewed/Confirmed(the code was read and the defect confirmed) and theStatus/*family.Status/*andReviewed/*are exclusive scopes — one of each at most, so applying a second replaces the first. - #73 is the roadmap. It states the order the backlog should be worked in and the soft relations that are not expressible as blockers. Picking work off the open list by eye when a meta issue states the sequence is how the sequence stops meaning anything.
- Hard blockers are real Gitea dependencies, which render on the
issue itself, and the blocked issue carries
Status/Blocked. - A PR body carries a commit-to-issue table, the verification
actually run, and a
Closeslist — PR #83 is the shape. That list is for whoever reads the PR; what actually closes an issue is the footer below.
The closing keyword goes in the commit body, one issue per line.
docs: delete four documents that contradict the code
<body>
Closes #98
Gitea parses commit messages that reach main; it does not parse the
PR body, which only closes anything if the merge happens to copy it
into the merge commit. Both halves of that were measured. #83's merge
commit carried Closes #9, #13, #14, … and closed five of ten — a
comma list is partially matched. #93's merge commit body was one
Reviewed-on: trailer, so #92 stayed open behind a perfectly correct
Closes line in the PR description.
A footer costs nothing elsewhere: Conventional Commits allows one,
scripts/commit-check.sh only regexes the subject, and
semantic-release reads the type from the subject — so this changes no
release decision. The rule that the issue number stays out of the
subject is unaffected, and was never about the body.
Check it anyway. A squash, or a merge message edited by hand,
still drops the footer. ./scripts/issue.sh list --state open after a
merge, looking for what you just shipped; ./scripts/issue.sh close <n> for whatever did not take, with a comment naming the commit.
Unclaiming is automatic, and it is hooked to the close rather than
to the merge. Gitea's auto-close changes state and nothing else, so a
footer left Status/In Progress on a closed issue — #100 was closed
and marked as being actively worked on at the same time.
.gitea/workflows/unclaim.yml runs on issues: [closed], which covers
the footer, issue.sh close and a click in the web UI alike; stripping
the label in the PR instead would have been a per-PR habit, and habits
are what the footer removed. It is not instant — the runner has
capacity 1 — and reopening deliberately does not restore the label.
./scripts/issue.sh list --state closed --label "Status/In Progress"
is how you find out it has stopped firing.
Planning
.planning/ is design documents and measured history, not a queue
— the queue is the tracker, and a plan file that describes work nobody
has started is a second, staler answer to "what are we doing next".
.planning/NOTES.md— gotchas, measured facts, open architecture questions, and the "we already considered and rejected" list. Dated, because several are properties of someone else's server. This is where a decision reached on an issue gets written down when it outlives the issue..planning/plans/completed/— one recap per shipped milestone, kept for the arguments in it. Where a plan shipped incompletely, its header says which issue carries the remainder..planning/audits/— the read-only audits that produced the reconciliation plans. Historical evidence; not a backlog..planning/plans/active/— a multi-phase design document for work in flight, linked from the issue that tracks it. Empty is the normal state. There is nopending/: a plan nobody is executing is an issue.
Numbering is sequential and stable across status moves (a plan keeps
its NNN- prefix). Abandoned plans are deleted.
Commands
make dev # Hot-reload development (installs deps, generates code, cleans frontend)
make dev-debug # Same as dev but with YJ_LOG_LEVEL=debug
make dev-headless # Start headless in the background and return (SEED=<name> to seed)
make dev-stop # Stop it (SIGTERM, so shutdown hooks run)
make dev-logs # Tail .dev/app.log
make testdata # Generate the deterministic fixture music library
make bulkdata # Generate the ~50k-track measurement library (BULK_TRACKS=)
make sandbox-seed NAME=<n> # Build a seeded YJ_HOME by *running* the app
make sandbox-seed-bulk # Same, from the bulk library (minutes; it is a real scan)
make perf LABEL=<n> # Measure a running app; writes .dev/perf/<n>.json
make perf-compare BEFORE=<a> AFTER=<b> # Print the before/after table
make build-dev # Debug build with symbols
make build-prod # Production build (stripped and trimmed; no UPX)
make generate # Run code generators (sqlc + templ via go generate)
make e2e # Playwright smoke suite against a running dev-headless app
make e2e-setup # Install the e2e runner + its browser (once)
make ui-test # Vitest component/store suite in a real browser (no app)
make ui-visual # Same, including toMatchScreenshot comparisons
make ui-setup # Install the Vitest provider's own Chromium (once)
make bindings-check # Fail if frontend/bindings is stale vs the Go bindings
make skill-check # Fail if .pi/ documents a make target that doesn't exist
make commit-check # Fail if a commit subject is not a Conventional Commit
make lint # golangci-lint v2 (strict), all three build configurations
make test # All tests with race detector, all three build configurations
make vulncheck # govulncheck for CVEs
make setup # Install go tools, frontend deps, git hooks (lefthook)
Running tests
Go test commands need no build tag for the app configuration. The
webkit2_41 tag every command here used to carry is gone with wails
v2: v3 builds against GTK4 + WebKitGTK 6.0 by default, which both Arch
and ubuntu:24.04 ship.
go test ./... # All tests
go test ./backend/player/ # Single package
go test -run TestName ./backend/player/ # Single test
The central index builder is behind a second tag and is not covered
by the command above — make test runs both passes, but a manual run
needs it spelled out:
go test -tags indexbuild ./backend/explore/... ./cmd/...
backend/testctl is behind a third tag and needs its own pass too
(make test runs all three):
go test -tags dev ./backend/testctl/...
Audio playback integration tests require YELLOWJACKET_INTEGRATION=1.
Fixtures and the headless harness
test_data/music_library_test/ is generated, not committed: run
make testdata (~1 s) before anything that needs audio. Tests reach it
through internal/testfixtures, selecting files by case
(CaseCoverDedup, CaseUnicode, CaseDuplicates, …) rather than by
path, and skip themselves when it has not been generated.
The app itself can be run without a blocking window — make dev-headless — and driven with playwright-cli against it on
:34115. That is wails v3's first-class -tags server mode: the real
app, the real bindings, the same Go backend a desktop window would use,
served over HTTP with no display at all. The Xvfb this used to
require is gone, from the script and from CI; dbus-run-session stays,
for MPRIS.
The operational half of all this lives in the
yellowjacket-dev skill (.pi/skills/yellowjacket-dev/): which tier
to reach for, the exact command sequences, seed lifecycle, and the
failure modes worth knowing before you meet them. It is deliberately
not repeated here — this section describes what exists, the skill says
what to run.
Two things ride on top of the headless launch, both from plan 005 phase 3:
- The event bridge.
.playwright/cli.config.jsonloads.playwright/init-events.jsas aninitScript, which records every backend event onwindow.__yjEvents. Half this app is push-driven, so assertions await an event, not a timeout:await window.__yjEvents.wait('LibraryScanComplete', {timeoutMs: 60000}). It also providesready()andcall('queue.Queue.GetState', []). Both hook v3's own seams rather than an internal: inbound iswindow._wails.dispatchWailsEvent, the entry point the backend's push uses, and outbound isfetch— v3 routes every runtime call through one POST to/wails/runtime, so one hook sees calls from any module and cannot miss one made before the harness looked.call()posts by method name, so it depends on nothing in the app's bundle and works on a page with no init script — which is whyseed-sandbox.shiscurlnow and needs no browser. It no longer races a timeout either: v3 rejects bad arguments and unknown methods cleanly. - The dev-only control surface,
backend/testctl, mounted at/__test/on the same port:health,db/snapshot,db/restore,emit(force any backend event, which renders push-driven views without staging the work that would produce them) andsql. It is compiled out of non-dev builds and additionally requiresYJ_TESTCTL=1, whichdev-headless.shsets andmake devdoes not.
Frozen regression specs live in e2e/ (its own npm package, so the
Vitest browser mode does not share a package with the Playwright
runner): make e2e against an already-running app.
A fifth tier exists for questions whose answer is a number, not a
pass: make bulkdata generates a ~50 000-track library (11 s, 466 MB,
gitignored), make sandbox-seed-bulk seeds from it by running the app
like any other seed, and make perf LABEL=x measures startup, the
bundle's shape and each view's first open, keystroke cost, what a
finished track provokes, what one favourite toggle costs, what sitting
idle on Settings costs, and heap after a scripted browse. A measurement
that needs state the seed does not have stages it itself, idempotently,
so a before and an after see the same shape — the favourite number is
meaningless against the seed's one empty playlist, so it builds ten
500-track ones first.
It wraps every bound Go method, so "did that refetch the library" is a
fact rather than an inference. It is not a spec and does not run in CI.
The cheapest tier needs none of that. make ui-test runs 776
Vitest tests in a real Chromium with no Wails, no backend, no seeded
library and no virtual display, because v3 routes every runtime call
— bindings, event emits, window, dialogs, clipboard — through one IPC
transport, and frontend/test/support/wails-fake.ts replaces it via
setTransport(), which is public documented API. So the fake covers
strictly more than v2's two globals did while being shorter, and the
tests exercise the real generated bindings, the real runtime and the
real store code. A binding carries an ID, not a name
($Call.ByID(2822423495) is FNV-1a over
yellowjacket/backend/home.Service.GetShelves), so the fake derives
that map from the generated tree rather than writing it down.
frontend/bindings/ is generated by wails3, not go generate, so
the pre-commit codegen check does not cover it. make bindings-check
(~3.5 s warm, ~20 s on a cold build cache, also a pre-commit hook)
regenerates it and fails on a dirty tree; make bindings regenerates it
for real. It is slower than v2's because v3's generator is a static
analyser over the whole package graph rather than runtime reflection
— which is also why the tag set it runs under matters, and why it is
the default one: that is the configuration users run, and neither
indexbuild nor dev adds a bound service. See
scripts/bindings-check.sh.
Seeds are produced by running the app, never by hand-writing a
config.toml and DB rows — the same discipline sql/schemas/ gets,
for the same reason.
See .planning/plans/completed/005-agent-development-harness.md.
Architecture
Wails app lifecycle (main.go → backend/app.go): main.go is
application.New(opts) → app.Window.NewWithOptions(…) → app.Run().
Each bound service takes its context from ServiceStartup(ctx, application.ServiceOptions{}) — v3 calls it on every service, in
registration order, on the main goroutine — and gives it back in
ServiceShutdown(). That context is cancelled on app shutdown,
which SetContext never was.
Three things about it are load-bearing.
ServiceShutdown() takes no context. A method with a
context.Context parameter does not satisfy the interface and is
silently never called — no error, no warning.
The cross-service wiring is a service, not an event. v3 has no
OnStartup/OnDomReady option, and the obvious replacement —
app.Event.OnApplicationEvent(events.Common.ApplicationStarted, …) —
is the right moment and the wrong mechanism: server mode emits no
application events at all (setupCommonEvents is an explicit no-op
under -tags server), so the desktop build wired itself and the
headless harness did not. backend/startup.go is registered last
instead, which takes the ordering from the mechanism rather than from
an event and therefore holds in every mode. Anything else keyed on
Common.* is suspect for the same reason.
The quit veto is asynchronous now. v2's MessageDialog blocked and
returned the button; v3's Show() returns immediately and the answer
arrives on a Button.OnClick callback, so ShouldQuit cannot ask and
answer in one call — it vetoes, shows the dialog, and calls
app.Quit() from the callback. quitConfirmed is what stops that
second Quit() asking again; quitAsking stops a second close attempt
stacking dialogs. Window state moved off that path entirely, onto a
Common.WindowClosing hook, because the size has to be read while the
window still exists and OnShutdown has neither a context nor a
window.
internalServiceMethods auto-excludes ServiceStartup,
ServiceShutdown, ServiceName and ServeHTTP from bindings, so this
shape removed 12 spurious bindings and the bogus context model
rather than renaming them.
Backend packages (under backend/):
-
player— Audio playback via beep.BufferedStreamerprovides a ring buffer for smooth seeking. -
queue— Track queue with shuffle (Fisher-Yates), repeat modes, auto-advance, and session persistence. -
library— Concurrent library scanning, metadata extraction, cover art deduplication, incremental rescan. Also removal, below. -
database— SQLite via pure-Go driver. Schema indatabase/sql/schemas/, queries indatabase/sql/queries/. sqlc generates Go code intodatabase/sql/sqlcgen/— never edit that directory by hand.The schema is one description, and there is no migration chain.
sql/schemas/*.sqlisCREATE ... IF NOT EXISTS, declares the current shape of every table, and is what sqlc reads and what an install gets verbatim. That is the whole mechanism:sql/migrations/,applyMigrationsandschema_migrationswere squashed away with the file-shaped rewrite (plan 013). A schema change is one edit to one file plusmake generate. Reintroducing a chain means reintroducing the drift it caused before —sql/schemas/and the migrations disagreed, and sqlc generated against the stale one.What that costs an existing database is repaired once, at open.
CREATE ... IF NOT EXISTSreaches an existing table only if its shape already matches and otherwise silently no-ops, so a changed table never migrates. Plan 014 addedtotal_trackstoexplore_indexand toindexRowFields— the projection every explore read uses — and no database that already existed grew the column: every Explore search, browse, artist and album page on such an install failed withno such column: total_tracks, while a fresh install was perfectly healthy, which is exactly why no test saw it. Plan 013 was worse on the same install:applySchemacould not be applied at all over a pre-013audio_files, so the app did not open.backend/database/staleshape.goruns beforeapplySchemaand retires what is stale, so the create is a create. Five things about it are load-bearing:- It parses
sql/schemas/for the expectation rather than writing the column list down a second time, because a second list is a second thing to forget — the fault it exists to repair. - It notices a changed type, not just a missing column. 013
moved
mbidfrom TEXT to BLOB, and SQLite does not coerce between them: a comparison against 16 raw bytes returns no rows rather than an error.ALTER TABLE ADD COLUMNwould have handledtotal_tracksalone and cannot express this at all, which is why the repair drops rather than migrates. Authoredis never retired, and that boundary is a test (TestAuthoredTablesAreNeverRetired), not a comment. Everything else is rebuildable:Cacheby definition,Ownedby a rescan — plan 013's stated "delete and rescan" — andDerivedfrom Owned. A table the schema no longer describes at all goes too; 013 left seven behind plusschema_migrations.- Whether a stale
Cachetable may be rebuilt is a build tag, and it is the most expensive thing in this file to get wrong. In the app the catalog is downloaded, so a wrong shape costs a minute of re-fetching the artifact and keeping it costs every Explore read. Incmd/indexbuildthe catalog is derived, and the only way back is the ~205 GB dump stream the/cachevolume exists to avoid — soretireStaleCacheis false there (staleshape_policy_indexbuild.go) andTestTheCatalogSurvivesAStaleShapefails the moment it is not.TestNoCacheTableIsRetiredHereis the same assertion made of everydatamapCache table rather than one, because the risk is not that shape recurring — it is the next destructive repair added todatabase.NewDB, the chokepoint every binary here shares, without asking which binary it is in. This is written down because it already happened: the repair shipped without the distinction and dropped the real CI catalog on its first run, withreason="column entity_type is TEXT, schema declares INTEGER". The mismatch was genuine — that database is deliberately kept in the older encoding, whichfix(indexexport): read an index older than the binaryexists to tolerate — so it would have been dropped on every run. The consequence is that a futureexplore_indexcolumn fails the index job loudly onapplySchemarather than silently costing it a rebuild, which is the trade a human should get to make. - The drops are one transaction with
defer_foreign_keys. Those legacy tables reference each other, so dropping them in any order fails on whichever goes first, and turning foreign keys off instead would silently takeplaylist_tracks.audio_file_id's ON DELETE SET NULL with it — leaving playlist entries pointing at ids a rescan reissues to different songs. Nulled entries are empty; stale ones are wrong, and wrong quietly. - The order is sorted, so a failure reproduces. Map order is random, and the foreign-key bug above passed its own regression test on two runs in three until the order was fixed.
Retiring
explore_indextakes its FTS and its meta with it, because thedump_import_donemarker is what would otherwise stop the artifact ever being fetched again.What that costs an existing database is that it does not open, and "delete and rescan" is the answer (plan 013, open question 1) — free for everyone except one machine. The index job's
/cachevolume is a realYJ_HOMEthat survives between runs, and half of it is the catalog: deleting it means re-downloading ~205 GB. Socmd/indexbuildrepairs it instead (staleschema.go), dropping every tabledatamapdoes not classify asCachebefore the schema is applied. Nothing scans, plays or authors in that database, so its non-catalog half is empty by construction and a shape left over from an older schema is pure liability. 013's reshapedaudio_filesfailed every run of that job onCREATE INDEX ... album_idagainst the old table until this;TestRetireLibraryTablesreproduces exactly that, symptom first.The local library is shaped like files, not like MusicBrainz.
audio_filescarries its own tags — title, artist credit, track and disc numbers, year, composer, the recording MBID — and points at two shared rows:albums(many files to one) andartists(many albums to one).file_genresis the one genuine many-to-many. That is the entire local model.It used to be MusicBrainz's:
recordings,release_group_recordings,artist_creditandartist_credit_artistsat between a file and its own tags. Measured on a real 25,966-file library, every many-to-many that model expressed was 1:1 in the data — no recording had two files, none belonged to two release groups, and 3 credits of 2,823 listed more than one artist. What it cost was a six-way join in every read, aMIN(release_group_id)subquery in eleven queries and a first-credited-artist subquery in nine to undo fan-outs that never happened, and a class of bugs where a metadata row outlived the file that created it: retagging a file created a new recording and abandoned the old one, so that library carried 812 orphaned recordings, 216 release groups and 260 artists — and 129 catalog rows that confidently claimed to be owned by files that no longer existed.A few things that follow, and bite if forgotten:
- Ownership is a file. "Do I own this" is asked of
audio_filesand nothing else —GetFilePathsByRecordingMBIDs,LibraryMBIDIndex.CheckMBIDs,collectLibraryEntitiesandpruneStaleLocalCrossReferencesall join it. A metadata row is not ownership; that was the bug, and it is now structurally impossible for a row to exist without its file. - The projection is defined once, in the
track_metadataview. Every query that returns a track selects from it, which is why there is one row type (sqlcgen.TrackMetadatum) and one mapper (trackFromRow). It existed before and only the raw-SQL search paths used it, so nine hand-rolled copies had already drifted: the view preferred the album's original year and one copy used the track's, and the same library reported different years on different screens. The FTS searches cannot be sqlc queries (MATCH is not in its grammar) and spell the column list out insearch.go— that is the one exception and it is one constant. library_id = 0means every library. Each list query used to exist twice, scoped and unscoped, with a branch at every call site and a separate binding for each. One query answers both, and the scoped form costs nothing measurable (23 ms against 21 ms over 26k rows).- A slice and a named parameter do not compose in sqlc.
sqlc.sliceexpands to N placeholders but a named argument is numbered independently, soGetFilePathsByAlbums([1,2], 0)read album id 2 as the library id. Where a query needs both, returnlibrary_idand filter in Go (inLibrary). - A cache without a ceiling is a leak with a schedule. Every
store that grows with use declares a budget beside its retention
(
browsedArtBudget,httpCacheBudget), because an age bound does not bound anything a user can outrun in an afternoon. - A query file must be ASCII. sqlc's parameter rewriter works on
byte offsets, so one non-ASCII character in a query comment
corrupts the generated Go into garbage like
SELECid. Schema files are not rewritten and may contain anything. - A view is dropped and recreated, not migrated.
CREATE VIEW IF NOT EXISTSno-ops against a database holding the old definition, sotrack_metadata.sqlopens withDROP VIEW IF EXISTS; a view holds no data, so rebuilding it on every open costs nothing. - A write wearing a query's shape still needs the writer.
DB.QueryContext/QueryContextWith/QueryRowroute to a query-only read pool (a secondsql.DBover the same file), so anINSERT ... RETURNINGissued through one fails at runtime with "attempt to write a readonly database (8)" — which is exactly whatCreateSmartPlaylistdid, meaning no smart playlist could be created at all. UseExecContext, orQueryRowWriterwhen the statement really does return a row. Nothing caught this becauseNewTestDBshares one in-memory connection and leavesreadDBnil, soreader()returns the writer under test.TestNoWritesOnTheReadPoolwalks the tree for it, in the same spirit asTestNoDirectRuntimeEmitsand for the same reason — a lint pass only sees one build configuration. - A new table has to say what kind of data it holds.
backend/datamapis a catalogue of every table's Kind and Lifetime, andTestCatalogCoversSchemafails on a table missing from it.TestAuthoredCascadesAreDeliberatethen makes an authored table that cascades an explicit, argued exemption — authored data is what a user cannot get back. Two entries say MIXED KIND and mean it:audio_filesis an owned projection except forplay_count,last_playedandtag_status, which are authored;lyricscarries asourcecolumn because a lyric read from a tag is free to rebuild and one fetched from LRCLIB is not. - Test data has one seeder.
database.InsertTestTrackinserts a file with its artist, album and genres. Twenty test files used to carry their own, each assembling the old FK chain in a slightly different order.
- It parses
-
metadata— Tag extraction (ID3v2, Vorbis Comments, FLAC). -
jobs— The registry every long-running operation reports through: progress, pause/cancel, a global indicator and (for scans) a pause that survives a restart. Library scans, index builds, downloads and the autotag apply are registered; anything that is not registered has none of that, which is exactly how the three gaps the audit found came about. -
config— TOML-based settings. Settings page uses HTMX + templ for server-rendered HTML fragments. -
playlist/smartplaylist— Playlist CRUD and rule-based smart playlists. -
mediacontrols— OS media controls behind oneHandler: MPRIS over D-Bus on desktop Linux, a MediaSession on Android, a no-op stub elsewhere. The split is by build tag andandroidimplieslinux, so the three files readlinux && !android,androidand!linux. Its Android half needs no JNI beyond what Wails exports — a JSON payload out throughapplication.Android.StartForegroundService, a command event back throughWailsBridge.emitEvent— and the Java it talks to isbuild/android/.../WailsForegroundService.java. That contract (payload keys, state words, command names) is inandroidpayload.gowithout the build tag, because a tagged file is compiled by nothingmake lintormake testruns and is untestable off a phone.OnDuckis the one callback MPRIS does not use: Android asks for attenuation rather than a pause when something short needs the output.Player.SetDuckkeeps it as an offset on top of the user's level rather than writing through to the volume, so it cannot accumulate and nothing persists or emits a level the user did not choose — and it only ever fires below API 26, where the framework does not already duck the app itself. -
system— OS-specific paths (XDG on Linux,%LOCALAPPDATA%on Windows). -
explore— Catalog search and browse overexplore_index. See below. Its shelves (shelves.go) are the page Explore shows before anyone types, onhome's terms — a shelf is a reason, it carries the sentence that says so, and an empty one is omitted. Queries returnexplore_indexrow ids and are joined back byrowsByIDs, so a card has one definition (artistFromIndex/releaseGroupFromIndex/recordingFromIndex, shared with the search path, which is where they were inlined).Three things about it are load-bearing. "No shelves" is three different statements here and the page says which — Home can omit an empty shelf honestly, because a library with no history really has less to say, but Explore's data is a downloaded artifact that can be absent or still arriving, so
ShelfPage.Stateisready,buildingorno-indexand the empty page names the missing catalog and points at Settings. Whether there is a catalog is asked of the database, not of a flag:GetIndexStatus().TotalRowsis refreshed only between build tiers (0 beside a full catalog on an ordinary launch) andIsReady()is set once at startup (so rows staged by a spec afterwards are invisible) — both are the shapeemitStatuswarns about, and oneSELECT 1 … LIMIT 1cannot be stale. And two shelves with disjoint ids still repeat each other: ordered by raw listen count the top albums are one act and its members and the artists row underneath was the same people, whichhome's duplicate guard cannot see because the rows hold different entity types. Shelves are one album per artist and skip whoever a row above already showed. Found by reading a screenshot.Two of the four shelves the plan named cannot be built, and the schema decides that rather than the design:
explore_indexhas no genre column to join a genre shelf to, andsimilar_artist_mapis not in the shipped artifact and is filled lazily from the network, so a "similar artists" shelf is empty exactly when the page most needs content. The library-joining shelf readsin_library, which is set by MBID, so it is correctly absent on an untagged library — the fixture one included. -
home— The home page's "start listening" shelves. Each shelf is a reason (what you played last, what you never played, a genre you have depth in) rather than a filter, and carries the sentence that says so. Its queries (sql/queries/home.sql) return album ids only and are joined back toGetAllAlbumsWithDetailsin Go, so the album projection has one definition. A shelf with nothing behind it is omitted, never rendered empty — and so is a shelf that repeats the one above it, which is the same rule one step further: "On repeat" was "Pick up where you left off" reordered, because a small library has one signal and answers several questions with the same albums. Two guards make that safe, and both were arrived at by breaking the existing tests: only shelves of three or more albums are judged (two rows of one overlap by 100% whenever they agree at all), and only when the shelf is not showing the whole library — a repeat is a fault only if a different row was possible. Measured against a fixed shelf size instead, an 11-album library kept three identical shelves while a 13-album one lost them.The app lands here, from
index.tsafter the stores are wired.index.htmlstill renders the track list eagerly and it is still what paints first — it is the cachedtracksview, so the navigation is a class toggle plus one chunk rather than a second render of the shell.app-sidebar's defaultactiveViewishometo match, because the sidebar does not hear anavigateit did not send. -
profiling— pprof server on:6060, compiled out in non-dev builds via build tags (internal/dev/).
Explore catalog (backend/explore/): the searchable MusicBrainz/
ListenBrainz catalog in explore_index. Deriving it from the MetaBrainz
dumps means streaming ~89 GB from a server that caps a client near
2 MB/s — half a day, for a catalog identical for every user. So that
work happens once, centrally, and users download the result:
cmd/indexbuildbuilds the catalog from the dumps;cmd/indexexportcuts it down to a shippable core and stamps its provenance..gitea/workflows/index-artifact.ymlruns both and publishes the compressed artifact under a fixedlatestversion.- The app fetches and merges that artifact (
artifactfetch.go,artifactimport.go) — about a minute, versus a day. - Everything the app does not need is behind the
indexbuildbuild tag (dumpimport.go,dumpcounts.go,dumpcatalog.go,dumpproject.go,dumpparallel.go,indexpatch.go) so it is not linked into the binary.dumpbuild_stub.gois the app-side entry point;dumpshared.goholds what both sides use. - The app keeps popularity current with the daily incremental dumps
(
dumpincremental.go), and resolves artists outside the artifact's coverage lazily on first view.
The catalog stores ids as bytes, and that is a size decision.
explore_index is 2,052,200 rows, and its MBIDs and entity types were
half of it: three 36-character text columns and one storing the words
"artist", "release_group", "recording" two million times. They are 16
raw bytes and a small integer now. Measured on a real catalog, the
table and its six indexes went 780 MB to 405 MB — the largest
single saving available in this app, and the reason a fresh install is
~0.6 GB rather than ~1.0 GB.
backend/explore/mbid.go is the only place that encoding is known.
Everything above it speaks dashed strings and entity names —
SearchIndexResult, the bindings, the frontend — and dbMBID /
dbEntityType convert at the SQL boundary. That confinement is the
point: the alternative is blobs reaching code that has no use for them.
Four things about it are load-bearing, and they exist because of how this fails when it fails: SQLite does not coerce between TEXT and BLOB, so a query comparing the column against a 36-character string returns no rows rather than an error, and a scan into a plain string yields sixteen bytes of mojibake. Neither is visible except as a result that is quietly empty.
- The column checks itself.
CHECK(length(mbid) = 16)means a stringly write fails at the insert that made it. It also caught every fixture that had been using"rh"as an MBID;testMBID()hashes a label into a real one so they stay readable. - The projection is one constant and one scanner.
indexRowColumns/scanIndexRowreplaced four copies of a 22-column list and four matchingScancalls — four chances to decode wrongly.indexRowColumnsFor("i")is the same list qualified, for the FTS join where both sides have atitle. - A query that names an entity type inline writes the code with the
name beside it —
entity_type = 1 /* artist */. Splicing a Go constant in would keep them in step automatically but makes every such query a concatenation;TestEntityCodesAreStablepins the mapping instead, because it is a storage format and changing one is not a refactor. TestStoredEncodingRoundTripssweeps every read path — lookup, top-N, exact match, FTS search, popularity batch, the CAA map — and asserts each returns something with a dashed id. A missed conversion site shows up there and essentially nowhere else.
The artifact is read in either encoding. A published artifact
carries whichever form the exporter that built it used, and there is one
already out there in the old text form. artifactStoresText asks the
artifact (typeof(mbid)) rather than trusting a version number, and
artifactSelectColumns converts on the way in — one unhex per row on
a once-a-month import, against requiring a rebuilt artifact before a new
build can read anything. That probe must run on the writer:
core is attached to that one connection, so QueryContext asks a
pool where the artifact does not exist, and the error would silently
select the conversion path for an artifact that needs none.
Its shape is the pattern for every column added after the fact.
artifactHasTotals is the same question about total_tracks, on the
same handle: an artifact built before a column existed is still a
perfectly good catalog, so it is asked and the missing column is
selected as a literal 0. Adding the column to the importer's SELECT
list without that is how a published artifact — which nobody can re-cut
retroactively — starts failing with no such column.
A credit is ordered parts, and the string is derived from them. A
track credited to several artists had exactly one navigable artist and
the rest were punctuation: primaryArtist() string-parses the credit,
strips a " feat. " clause and discards the guest, and deliberately does
not split on &, with or , because those live inside real artist
names ("Simon & Garfunkel"). Measured on a real 26,069-file library,
13% of recordings are multi-artist upstream while only 0.86% of
files carry a structured multi-artist tag — mp3 carries zero files
with multiple MUSICBRAINZ_ARTISTID across 19,840 — so this cannot be
a tag-parsing feature. (The "3 credits of 2,823" figure that justified
plan 013's removal of the credit tables measured our own writer:
cachedLinkArtist ran once per credit, so a collaboration could never
have been recorded. Dropping the join table was still right on cost.)
artist_credit_part / artist_credit_ref carry the decomposition for
multi-artist credits only — a single-artist credit is already
explore_index's own artist_name, and storing those would triple the
table to say nothing. Five things about it are load-bearing:
- Join phrases are assembly instructions, not disassembly ones.
creditLinkconcatenates parts, so link boundaries are known by construction. Locating acredited_nameinside the stored credit string would reintroduce the fault this exists to fix: that string may come from the file's tags while the parts come from the catalog, and the two disagree for ~1 in 3 multi-artist credits ('Skrillex feat. Swae Lee'tagged against'Skrillex & Swae Lee'upstream). credited_nameis stored per row, never joined fromartists: MusicBrainz credits "Snoop Dogg" on a track by the artist called "Snoop Doggy Dogg". Display follows the credit, navigation the MBID.- The lookup is keyed on the recording MBID, which the catalog and a
local file both carry (
library.Track.RecordingMBID), so one binding serves Explore and the library's own lists — which is why this needed no local table.file_artistsremains the offline-resilience step and is deliberately not declared until something writes it. - Absence is cached as an answer.
credit-store.tsstores[]for a single-artist credit — asked, not answered — or the ~87% that have nothing to decompose are re-requested on every render forever.request()is per-row and coalesces into one call per frame, because a virtualized list cannot hand over "the whole list": 50,000 rows is 100 queries for the ~30 on screen. - The dump is a third source, and it had to be. The canonical dump
CI already streams has no join phrases and no as-credited names, and
the JSON dumps cover 153,691 recordings of ~35M with zero overlap
against a real library. So
mbdump.tar.bz2— 7.1 GB, ~13.7 min in pure-Go bzip2, whose members are alphabetical, which is what lets one pass resolve an entity's credit without buffering 35M recordings. The pass runs on every mode, because a complete import meansrefresh, which never enters the importer at all, and it reports whether it populated anything sochangedrepublishes the artifact.
A 0.6 GB download asks about the connection first. explore's
catalog artifact had no network awareness at all, which on a phone is a
month's data allowance spent without being asked (plan 016 B4).
netpolicy.go is the gate, and its shape is dictated by one constraint:
explore is imported by cmd/indexbuild, which is built with
CGO_ENABLED=0 and must not link Wails — so the policy and the
parsing live here and are tested on every platform, while the platform
call is a closure injected from app.go. It is
application.Mobile.NetworkJSON(), not application.Android's: the
latter exists only under the android build tag, and Mobile's desktop
implementation is a stub returning "".
Three rules in it are load-bearing. An unknown answer is not a metered
one — only mobile answers at all, so treating silence as metered would
refuse the download on every desktop. Cellular is the only signal
available: the runtime reports wifi|cellular|ethernet|none and no
metered flag, so a metered Wi-Fi (a hotspot, a hotel) cannot be
detected and is not refused, which is a documented gap rather than an
oversight. And the gate runs before anything is staged, so declining
is a no-op rather than a job in the indicator and a status the user has
to dismiss. The permission (AllowMeteredCatalogDownload, default
false, so an existing config is careful without a migration) is read at
the moment a download would start, so turning it on takes effect on the
next attempt rather than the next launch.
Background work yields, and says so in the context. The post-scan
backfills share MusicBrainz's rate limiters with every page the user
can open, and both were FIFO — so a thousand-artist enrichment put an
album page behind an hour of queued work.
RateLimiter.WithBackgroundLane(perSecond) adds a second, slower lane
and WithBackgroundPriority(ctx) marks a caller as belonging to it: a
marked wait takes no token at all while any interactive wait is
outstanding, and is then paced at MB's own 1/s rather than the
interactive burst rate. It is a context marker rather than a
parameter because a backfill calls the same MusicBrainzClient
methods a detail page does — GetArtistImage takes a ctx for no
other reason than to carry it. One request of slippage is accepted and
documented at waitBackground: cancelling an already-granted
reservation is not something a token bucket can express, and the cost
is one request-time.
The other half is that a long backfill has to be visible and
stoppable: jobs.KindCatalogEnrich and startBackfillJob
(backfilljob.go) register both backfills with progress and cancel.
Two rules in it are load-bearing. The job is registered after the
work is counted, because these passes are a no-op on every launch once
the library is covered and an empty job in the indicator is noise. And
the kind is distinct from index-build rather than reused, because
job-controls.ts keys its "you will discard hours of downloading"
confirmation on that kind — wrong prompt for a pass that is resumable
per artist and free to stop.
An owned artist's discography is fetched, not sampled.
BackfillLibraryDiscographies is two fetches per owned artist, each
skipped by its own persistent mark, because they fail independently and
one boolean covering both either over-claims or forces repeats:
the ListenBrainz top release groups and recordings
(explore_index.discog_fetched) and the full MusicBrainz browse
(artist_enrichment.browsed_at).
What it does not fetch is the point. It ran for hours against a
900-artist library and marked nothing, because three of the four things
it did per artist were work nobody had asked for. Similar artists were
fetched for every owned artist, when the artist page already resolves
them on view through SimilarArtists → ensureSimilarArtistsAsync —
which is what stamps similar_at now. And indexOneArtist reached the
MB artist lookup it wants (GetArtistDetails reads that cache) by
calling GetArtistImage, which additionally queried fanart.tv,
TheAudioDB, Wikidata and Wikipedia and downloaded up to ten full-size
portraits; EnsureArtistRels is the lookup on its own. The corollary
is written into the query: similar_at must not be one of the
conditions in unenrichedLibraryArtistMBIDs, because testing a mark
this pass no longer sets makes every owned artist a candidate on every
run, forever.
The rest is that the pass was serial across artists while every
limiter that keeps us polite is per-host and idle — so one artist's
slowest upstream set the pace for the whole run. It runs
discogBackfillWorkers artists at once (concurrency here raises no
origin's request rate), each under discogBackfillArtistTimeout,
because the MB client retries a 503 five times honouring Retry-After
and one throttled artist could otherwise outlast a hundred healthy
ones. A timed-out artist goes unmarked and is retried next run, which
is what every other failure here already does. SQLite's writer pool is
MaxOpenConns(1), so the workers queue at the Go level rather than
racing for the file.
Five things about the marks are load-bearing. A mark records that the
upstream was asked, not that it answered with something. ListenBrainz
returns 200 and [] for an artist it has no popularity data for — which
is most of a long-tail library, and the same is true of an artist whose
every row falls under indexMinPopularity — and keying
discog_fetched on "did rows come back" made those artists permanent
candidates: "Filling in artist details" re-ran for up to
discogBackfillMaxPerRun of them on every launch, forever, doing
the same two fetches to the same empty answer. So indexOneArtist sets
the mark when both fetches succeeded (fetchTopReleaseGroups and
fetchTopRecordings return an error for that reason), and only a real
failure — transport, non-2xx, unreadable body — leaves the artist for
the next run. browseFullDiscography already had this right: an artist
with genuinely no release groups is still marked browsed. The marks are a table, not
more explore_index columns, because artifactimport.go merges the
downloaded catalog by column list — a flag added there is a second
place to remember, and forgetting it silently wipes every mark on the
next catalog update. discog_fetched stays in explore_index for the
opposite reason: the artifact legitimately answers it for artists it
covers. The artifact answering it is not "we have their
discography" — its per-artist coverage is graded, so an artist can
arrive discog_fetched = 1 and never have been browsed, which is why
the unenriched query ORs its conditions instead of testing the
first. BrowseReleaseGroupsAll pages to exhaustion where
BrowseReleaseGroups asks for MaxLimit once and takes what comes
back — a prolific artist was silently cut at 100 release groups, and a
hundred albums looks like a complete answer unless you count. And the
per-artist mark replaced a heuristic that could never be satisfied:
BrowseReleaseGroups used to re-browse whenever no indexed row carried
a secondary type, which is permanently true for an artist whose
releases are all plain albums.
One artist portrait is downloaded; the rest are remembered as URLs.
resolveAllSources asked five upstreams what images they had for an
artist and then downloaded every candidate, up to ten, full size,
serially — while nothing in the app has ever read anything but
primary.jpg and its three tiers. Measured on a real cache: 5.3 GB,
of which 4.1 GB was candidates no code path can reach, ~940 kB per
artist against the ~217 kB that is actually used.
It is split now. resolveCandidates does the metadata lookups and
returns an ordered list; fetchPrimary walks that list downloading
until one succeeds, makes that the primary, and records the rest
with an empty file_path — known, not fetched — so replacing a
portrait later is one download rather than five lookups again. Taking
the first that succeeds rather than the first outright is also a fix:
the old loop keyed is_primary on the index, so a failed candidate 0
left the artist with a stored image, no primary.jpg, and a .miss
marker claiming there was no artwork at all. The winning candidate is
no longer also written under its own name, since setPrimary writes
the same bytes to primary.jpg.
Two janitor jobs go with it, and the first is why the waste survived.
OrphanedArtistImagesJob joined the bare MBID onto the images
directory — but artist directories are sharded under a two-character
prefix, so it named a path that has never existed, RemoveAll
succeeded on it, and the job deleted the rows that were the only record
of the files it left behind. explore.ArtistImageDir is that layout's
one definition, passed in the way OrphanedCoverFilesJob takes
expandVariants, and the test lays its fixtures out with it — a test
that invents its own flat layout agrees with the bug.
StrayArtistImageFilesJob reclaims what earlier versions downloaded,
keeping only explore.ArtistImageKeepNames() and refusing an empty
keep set for the reason the covers sweep refuses an empty live set.
An age is not a ceiling, and a cache needs one. Art for an artist
the user owns is kept indefinitely; everything else aged out after 90
days and nothing counted it, so the same install held portraits for
5,770 artists in a 1,301-artist library — every artist page opened
in Explore fetches one, and a browsing afternoon is entirely inside the
retention window. browsedArtBudget (256 MB) is the second pass:
oldest browsed artist first, until what is left fits, with owned
artists outside the budget entirely. httpCacheBudget is the same rule
one cache over, and it is what makes the year-long entity TTL below
safe — once answers stop expiring, expiry stops being a bound.
"Owned" is a file here too. The sweep's live set used to be "there
is an artists row", which the file-shaped schema made meaningless;
it joins audio_files now, like every other ownership question. Its
test had seeded an artists row with no file and called it owned — the
exact phantom, in the fixture of the test that guards it.
Only the tiers of a cover are stored. saveCoverArt writes
_sm/_md/_lg and records the largest as cover_art.file_path;
coverart.ResolveURLs reports that one as Original too, because it
is the largest kept. The full-resolution image used to be written
beside them and was 1,134 MB of a 1.4 GB covers directory against
110 MB for all three tiers — with nothing rendering it, since the grid
caps at 350 px and the largest tier is 400. The bytes are still in the
audio file, which is where they came from, so the repair pass that
regenerated tiers from the stored original went with it.
Frontend (frontend/): Lit 3.2 web components + Web Awesome UI library + HTMX. State management via singleton reactive stores in src/store/. Wails bindings auto-generated as TypeScript in frontend/bindings/, nested by Go import path — don't edit by hand. The @go alias absorbs the constant prefix, so a call site imports @go/library/library.js.
One seam states what the generated types get wrong, rather than 78 patches. v3's generator is honest where v2's lied: a Go nil slice marshals to JSON null and always has (v2 typed it T[]), and a Go named string type is a closed set (v2 typed it string). There is no flag to turn either off, correctly. So utils/binding.ts states the app's actual contract at the only place it is true — list yields [] for a nil slice, dict/dictByName yield {} for a nil map and drop null-valued keys (which loses nothing: noUncheckedIndexedAccess already makes every read V | undefined), and compact is the same for a map arriving as a field. Where a nullable slice is a model field there is no boundary to put it at, and those are ?? [] at the point of use.
All three also return a plain Promise: v3 bindings return a CancellablePromise and nothing in this app cancels one, so letting it inward would put a Wails type in every store signature for a capability none of them use.
A view is a chunk, and three components are not. index.ts holds a
loader table (VIEW_LOADERS, DETAIL_LOADERS) and awaits a view's
module before creating its element — document.createElement on an
undefined tag yields an inert HTMLElement rather than throwing, so a
missing entry is a blank page, not an error. Navigations are numbered
and anything after the await re-checks it is still the newest, or a
slow chunk lands on top of a faster navigation. Every chunk is then
warmed on idle, so the split is paid once at startup rather than on
every first visit. notification-host, inline-notice and
confirm-dialog stay eager on purpose: a failure surface that has to
fetch a chunk before it can speak is not a failure surface, and the
moment it is most needed is the likeliest moment loading one fails.
first-run-wizard and the startup chrome are eager for the ordinary
reason — they are the first paint.
A navigation is a history entry, and that is the whole back stack.
index.ts records each navigation with pushState (same URL — the app
has no routes, and a path a reload cannot resolve is worse than none)
and replays popstate with _isBack. It exists for Android, whose back
button is not a key the page can bind: the scaffold's
MainActivity.onBackPressed asks webView.canGoBack() and finishes the
activity otherwise, so an app that never touched history quit from any
depth — which is what a device reported. Hooking the platform's own
mechanism rather than adding a JNI callback is also what makes it
testable in a browser (page.goBack()), and the Java half needed no
change at all.
Two rules hold it up. The first navigation replaces the launch
entry rather than pushing one, or every launch costs a back press before
the app will close. There are two launch navigations, which is what
defeated that rule for five phases: the eager navigate → home at the
foot of index.ts and the configured page GetDefaultPage() resolves
to later. Only the first replaced, so a fresh session was already one
entry deep, the first back press replayed home over home, and on Android
canGoBack() was true so the press that should have exited the app did
nothing (#142). The landing-page navigation carries _replace, honoured
only while still at index 0 — past that the user has navigated during
the backend call, and a slow answer must not overwrite an entry they
made. And the in-app back buttons (navigate-back, fired
by the detail views and now-playing-view) go through history.back()
rather than a stack of their own: the old navStack is deleted, not
kept beside it, because two stacks is precisely how a view's own back
button and the phone's gesture come to disagree about what one press
means.
And there is one statement of which view is active, for the same
reason: popstate calls handleNavigate() directly and dispatches no
navigate, so the two nav components — which learned the active view
from that event — kept highlighting the view the user had just left.
store/active-view-store.ts is the shell saying where the user is, and
both navs read it through ActiveViewController rather than holding an
activeView of their own.
Four things about it are load-bearing.
"Please go to X" and "the active view is now X" are different
statements, and only the first existed — dispatched from 28 call
sites across 18 files. A re-dispatch from inside handleNavigate is
not the fix and cannot be: that function is the document listener for
navigate, so it is an infinite loop.
It is a store rather than an event, because a component that mounts
after a navigation still has to know. bottom-nav's "More" drawer
creates its <app-sidebar> on open, and that copy had heard no
navigate at all — standing on Albums, the drawer opened highlighting
Home. An event has no answer for a listener that was not there.
A detail view is not a view here, so the destination it was opened
from stays lit. app-sidebar did that by accident (it guarded on
navItems.some(...), so an unmatched name left its highlight alone)
and bottom-nav had no such guard and so lit nothing — which is why
one looked right and the other looked broken on the same screen.
Whether a view is primary is the shell's fact: view in VIEW_TAGS is
passed to setView, never re-derived, because a second copy of that
list is a second thing to forget.
Nothing is lit until the shell has navigated. The store starts
empty rather than defaulting to home, which is what app-sidebar's
field used to do to match the landing view — a default that is correct
only while GetDefaultPage() agrees with it.
Back and forward are chrome, and the depth is the shell's own
count. <nav-history> in the top bar is #6: the stack was always
global — every navigation is an entry and popstate restores any of
them in either direction — so what was missing was an affordance, since
the only way back was a detail view's own button, which leaves the
screen with the view it belongs to. The buttons dispatch
navigate-back / navigate-forward and the shell owns both guards,
for the reason the old navStack was deleted: a second caller reaching
for history is how two stacks come to disagree.
Three things about it are load-bearing. Forward is not back
negated, so the single pushedEntries counter could not express it —
popstate carries no direction and fires identically both ways, so a
counter decremented on every pop reads a forward as a second back. Each
entry carries its index (yjIdx) and the shell keeps the current one
and a high-water mark; that also survives a jump of more than one,
which history.go(-n) and a long-press on a browser's back button both
produce. A control that cannot act is disabled here, which is the
documented exception to library-status-indicator's rule: the two are
a pair whose positions the user learns, and hiding one moves the other
under the cursor. And it stands down below 900px — the top bar is
what runs out of room first below that (it already overflows 600px by
11px, #143), and nothing becomes unreachable: nav.back / nav.forward
(Alt+Left / Alt+Right, the browser's own combination, and clear of
the bare arrows that seek) are global at every width, and the phone has
the platform's gesture.
The assertion is aria-current="page", in
e2e/specs/back-navigation.spec.ts. That file existed throughout the
bug, covered exactly these journeys, and asserted only
data-active-view — the shell's own bookkeeping, which was right the
whole way through — so it was green on the broken build. Same trap as
layout-overflow.spec.ts and page-header: a spec named for the
behaviour, measuring the plumbing.
Which destinations exist is configuration, and hiding one takes away
the nav item and nothing else. Eleven sidebar entries is more than
most libraries need (#25), so each is toggleable from Settings →
Navigation, Autotag is off until asked for, and Downloads is absent
until there is a client to download with — a destination for a feature
that cannot work is worse than none. navigate still resolves a hidden
view, which is not a nicety: detail views navigate into these and the
launch page is one of them. Nothing needed a special case for the
highlight either, because the paragraph above moved that onto
active-view-store: the sidebar asks isActive(id) per rendered
item, so a hidden view lights nothing exactly as a detail view does.
Five things about it are load-bearing.
The stored shape is a map keyed by view id, and an absent key means
that view's own default (backend/config.Views). That is what makes
this need no migration in either direction, and it is the polarity rule
AllowMeteredCatalogDownload states: the zero value is the intended
answer. A HiddenViews []string cannot express "Autotag off by
default" at all — its zero value is hide nothing — and a struct with
a boolean per view turns a view that later stops existing into stored
garbage. Here an unknown key is dropped on load and a view added later
gets its own default rather than being invisible or forcibly visible.
It is also what makes #73's #25 → #27 order safe rather than
backwards: when Jobs folds into Settings, jobs = true in somebody's
config is a key nothing asks about.
Two states the user could not get out of are refused, in the config
and not in the checkbox. Settings is never hideable and the launch
page is not hideable while it is the launch page. config.toml is
hand-editable, so a disabled checkbox is the affordance and
SetViewVisible is the rule — an app that can be locked out of its own
Settings by a typo in TOML is a support problem nobody can debug
remotely. On load the launch page is instead un-hidden rather than
refused: there is nobody to tell, and the honest reading of "my launch
page is Autotag" is that this user wants Autotag, not that their launch
page should be silently reset to something they did not choose.
Downloads is gated at the nav and not in the config, on
downloadStore.available, so switching it on in Settings still means
what it says once a client exists and the tab appears without a restart
(#37's rule). available is false until the providers have loaded,
which makes the item appear on a fresh launch rather than appearing
and then vanishing.
The tab bar honours the toggles too, and the reason is local rather
than a general rule about phones. PHONE_COLUMN_IDS is the precedent
for "what a phone shows is a different question", and it would apply —
except that bottom-nav's "More" opens the same <app-sidebar>,
which filters, so an unfiltered bar would contradict its own drawer one
tap away. Which four tabs is still plan 016's committed subset; this
only removes from it, and "More" is never filtered because it is how
everything else stays reachable.
The list of destinations is services/view-meta.ts, on
shortcut-meta.ts's pattern, because #25 gave it a second reader:
Settings renders a toggle per view and needs the same labels in the
same order. Which views exist and what an unconfigured install shows is
Go's (backend/config.Views, which DefaultPage's validation reads
too, so the launchable set is not a second list); how they are drawn
is the frontend's, beside the rest of the icon vocabulary. The binding
returns the resolved map for every view, so the frontend holds no
copy of the defaults — which would be the copy that shipped in the
binary rather than the one being edited.
A primary view is cached, not unmounted. index.ts keeps every
primary view in the DOM and toggles a .view-hidden class, because that
is what preserves scrollTop across navigation — so
disconnectedCallback never fires for one, and anything registered
there runs for the life of the session from pages it is not on. The
missing half is utils/view-lifecycle.ts: navigation calls
viewDeactivated() on the outgoing view and viewActivated() on the
incoming one, and a view registers its document listeners, timers and
backend subscriptions through listenWhileActive /
intervalWhileActive / whileActive, which are torn down on the way
out. An off-screen view also does not render. A shared reactive
controller gets the same treatment via registerViewAware.
The player's position comes from the player. seek-bar renders
PlaybackPositionChanged (payload player.PositionInfo), emitted at
1 Hz while playing and immediately on load, play, pause, seek and
natural finish. Its local setInterval is interpolation between
reports only, stopped and restarted by every one of them — it used to
be the clock, and counted itself 30 s away from the backend across four
keyboard seeks. A report carries trackChangeId (the store is a
singleton, so a bar mounting later must not adopt a report about the
previous track) and a seq (the same second reported twice still has
to reset the interpolation).
What the player cannot do, it says: PlaybackFailed is emitted from
both the load and the play path, auto-advance skips the failed
track (bounded by the queue length, so a disconnected drive stops after
one pass), and the bottom bar shows one coalescing line — "Skipped 12
tracks that could not be played." That line is the Inline level of the
app's one notification surface, below.
Failure has one voice, and the caller picks how loud.
store/notification-store.ts is the only notification surface; before
it, 84 catch blocks ended at console.error and two components had
grown private toasts. Four levels, chosen by the call site from one
rule — a failure is only worth interrupting for if the user can do
something about it that they are not already doing:
- Blocking (
wa-dialog, must be acknowledged) for data at risk: a folder left holding a mix of old and new tags. Two callers are anticipated; a third should be argued for. - Persistent (stays, with an action) for something the user asked for that did not happen and retrying is meaningful.
- Transient (a toast) for a small action whose state visibly reverted anyway — a favourite that came back.
- Inline, rendered by
<inline-notice region="…">in the panel that failed, never as a toast.
Three things about it are load-bearing. Coalescing lives in the
store, keyed by (level, region, key) within a window, so 200
unplayable files are one message with a count and no future caller has
to remember that. An inline notification carries a region, because
"inline" says not global, not where. And the bottom band belongs
to the player — the app-level stack sits under the header, since the
player's own floating notice grows upward by however many lines it
needs and a bottom-anchored stack collides with it on a small window.
What reaches a person is a sentence: utils/describe-error.ts maps the
causes a user can act on (offline, timeout, not found, permission,
database busy) to copy, explainError repeats a backend message when it
is one of our sentinels rather than a Go wrapping chain, and the raw
text stays in console.error. The one documented exception is a
download client's connection test, whose verbatim error is the user's
debugging tool.
Destructive actions ask once, through confirmAction()
(components/confirm-dialog/), which is a wa-dialog and so brings the
focus trap and Escape the hand-rolled overlays do not have.
Every dialog in the app is a wa-dialog, and there is no sixth
pattern. The four hand-rolled autotag overlays and the remove-library
confirmation had no role, no aria-modal, no focus trap and no focus
restore — including the two gating an irreversible on-disk metadata
rewrite. The split is by shape, not by owner: a dialog that only asks
a question is a confirmAction() call (title, message, impact,
confirm/cancel), and a dialog carrying input is a <wa-dialog> in
the host's own template. Both remaining autotag dialogs render
unconditionally with ?open deciding which is up — mounting one on
demand puts the element and its showModal() in the same update.
autotag-view's last document keydown listener died with them; it
existed only because its dialogs could not close themselves.
None of them had an accessible name, and one helper gives all of them
one. Every call site passes label; Web Awesome renders it into an
<h2 id="title"> in the same shadow root as the native <dialog> and
never points aria-labelledby at it — so for eleven dialogs
getByRole('dialog', {name}) matched nothing and a screen reader
announced an unnamed dialog. utils/name-dialog.ts sets that IDREF
(and falls back to aria-label under without-header, which renders
no heading to point at), called from each host's updated().
Three things about it are load-bearing. It reaches into another
library's shadow root, which is open but is not API — acceptable
here only because the failure is bounded: if Web Awesome moves the
structure the query misses, nothing is written, and the dialog is as
unnamed as it was. It uses aria-labelledby, not aria-label,
because three call sites compute their label at render time and an
IDREF to the heading Web Awesome re-renders stays correct with nothing
resyncing it. And it waits for the dialog's own first update, not
its host's: wa-dialog is a Lit element whose shadow root is populated
in its update, so a query at the host's firstUpdated finds an empty
root and names nothing — the same lifecycle trap that hid
wa-dropdown-item's role from the menu keyboard model.
Two awkwardnesses remain, and they are about locating one rather than
naming it. The host is display: contents, so the element carrying the
testid always reports hidden — what is visible is the <dialog> inside
it — and what holds the slotted content is the host's shadow root,
not the dialog's subtree. A third is worth knowing before checking any
of this: the Playwright a11y snapshot never prints a dialog's name,
named or not, so it cannot tell you whether this works. getByRole
can, and CDP's Accessibility.getFullAXTree gives the browser's own
answer.
A disclosure is a button, and it says what it controls.
config-section's header was a bare <div @click> with no tabindex,
no role and no aria-expanded, and every section defaults to
collapsed — so every setting in the app sat behind a control that could
not be tabbed to (the audit's last Critical). It is a
<button aria-expanded aria-controls> now, on the pattern
explore-artist-details has had five of all along, and the body
renders unconditionally and is toggled with hidden: aria-controls
has to name an element that is in the DOM, and a conditional <slot>
only stops projecting light-DOM children that exist either way.
Downloads' two tabs are the same fix one page over — role=tablist over
role=tab, one roving tab stop, Left/Right/Home/End, and a
role=tabpanel whose id and aria-labelledby swap with the tab.
A menu has a keyboard model, and it is one model.
utils/context-menu-controller.ts exports MenuKeyboard — focus
the first item on open, Arrow/Home/End to move (wrapping, as a menu
does and a listbox does not), Enter/Space to activate, Escape or Tab to
close, and focus back to the element it opened from. It is standalone
rather than part of ContextMenuController because playlist-view
renders a menu without that controller, and two menus with two keyboard
models is exactly what this is for. isContextMenuKey() is the
Shift+F10 / ContextMenu-key test, and openFrom(el) is the keyboard
open: anchored to the element, restoring focus to it.
Four things in it are load-bearing, and two of them are only visible against the real components:
- The items are not items yet when the host finishes updating.
wa-dropdown-itemsets itsrolein its own first update, so a[role^="menuitem"]query atupdateCompletefinds nothing — which reads exactly like a menu that opened and refused to take focus. focus()on a popup that has not positioned itself is a silent no-op, so the first focus is retried across a few frames.- Focus is only taken back if the menu had it. A click elsewhere closes the menu too, and pulling focus to the row the user right-clicked a moment ago is worse than leaving it.
- Web Awesome keys an item's tabindex and highlight off
active, so moving focus without setting it leaves the highlight on whichever item the mouse last touched.
And a menu opens from a finger, through the event it already has.
utils/long-press.ts is one document-capture listener installed once
from index.ts: a touch that holds still for 500 ms dispatches a
synthetic contextmenu at the touch point, so all six components that
bind one — delegated on a virtualizer, per row, per card — gained the
gesture without changing. The target is composedPath()[0] rather than
elementFromPoint, which stops at the outermost shadow host and so
reaches a delegated listener and no per-row one; a browser that fires
its own long-press contextmenu (Chromium does, WebKit and the WebView
vary) wins, ours being told from theirs by identity rather than
isTrusted, since no test can dispatch a trusted event; and the click
that ends the gesture is swallowed, keyed on the gesture rather than on
a time window so the first tap on the menu it opened is not eaten too.
Three lists had no focused row to open a menu from — the queue panel
and both playlist detail views — and gained a roving tab stop through
utils/roving-rows.ts. track-list deliberately does not use it:
its equivalent predates this, carries selection semantics (shift-extend,
ctrl-toggle) the other three do not have, and is pinned by its own
tests.
A shared panel computes its own name, and its items ask what the
target can do. explore-artist-details had a menu for its top
tracks and none on the release cards, which are most of the page. It
has one now on both release shapes — the top section's
LBTopReleaseGroup and the discography's MBReleaseGroup — normalised
to a ReleaseMenuTarget at the moment the menu opens, so the union
does not reach five action handlers. ctxMenuTarget is a discriminated
union rather than one nullable field per kind because the panel is
shared: that is what keeps aria-label moving with the target, which
is the fault cover-grid shipped (every menu announced as "Album
actions").
Which items appear is decided by what the release can actually do, and
those are three different questions. Playback is gated on a local
album id, not on the badge's "owned": a release matched by MBID with
no local album behind it has nothing to queue, and GetFilePathsBy‐ Albums is keyed on the id for the reason the album page is — an owned
but untagged release has no recording MBIDs, so an MBID-keyed lookup
returns nothing while looking entirely correct. The request item needs
the opposite, a catalog MBID, so it is absent for a library-only
release (local:<n>, unwrapped the same way navigateToAlbum does) —
which is also the one case where wanting it makes no sense.
Async surfaces say what they are doing. styles/sr-only.css.ts
carries the visually-hidden class and the rule that comes with it: a
live region must be in the DOM before the text it announces is,
because most screen readers announce a change to a region they are
already watching and ignore one that appears with its content already
in it. So these regions render unconditionally and empty, and only
their text changes. Four surfaces have one — the track list (loading,
failed, and how many rows a search matched), Explore's search,
now-playing (in both render branches, so it exists before the
first track arrives) and job-indicator, whose label swings between
"Scanning Music", "3 background jobs" and "Finished". The notification
surface already had one from Phase 3.
A colour's role decides whether it can be fixed across themes. A
fill — --yj-error, --yj-success — is "what colour is a danger
button", which is red in every theme and stays fixed. A text colour
— --yj-error-text — is "what colour is the word failed on this
background", which cannot be: one value cannot clear 4.5:1 against both
a near-black and a near-white surface, and the old fixed set measured
2.31–4.28:1 on nearly all of them. And every fill carries a computed
foreground (--yj-accent-fg, --yj-*-fg) rather than a written-down
one, because the accent is a colour picker: white on the default
#ffd43b is 1.43:1. readableOn() keeps white where white clears and
flips to black where it does not, and accentTextOn() mixes the accent
along its own hue until it clears the ramp's surface — returning it
unchanged on both dark ramps. Two accent buttons used to take their
foreground from --yj-bg-base, which inverts with the ramp; that is a
token used for the wrong meaning, and it only shows in the theme nobody
looks at.
Contrast is a property of the ramp, and the ramps are data.
theme-store's SHADE_PALETTES — not tokens.css.ts, which holds only
the type scale and icon sizes — is where the colours live, applied to
:root at runtime, which is why the var(--yj-…, #fallback) at every
call site is dead in practice. Every text colour clears 4.5:1 against
every surface it can sit on, and theme-contrast.test.ts computes that
from the table rather than trusting it. Three rules hold it up.
bgOverlay is not a text surface on the dark ramp — sizing tertiary
to clear it needs a grey lighter than secondary, and an inverted ramp
is a worse answer than the problem, so the one component that put text
there uses primary. A generated colour is a family, not a colour:
utils/avatar-color.ts exists because hsl(hue, 45%, 35%) behind white
initials failed for 35 of the 360 hues, so the failure came and went
with how an artist's name hashed — the test walks all 360. And
make ui-visual cannot see any of this: the component tier renders
the fallbacks, because the theme only reaches :root in the real app.
A stated motion preference outranks an app setting, and the state a
fix lands in is a state nobody has looked at. now-playing's marquee
ran for as long as a track played with no way to pause it (WCAG 2.2.2),
and the guard is in shouldScroll() rather than in CSS: the cycle is a
transition out, a transitionend and a transition back, so suppressing
the animation strands the text off its own box with nothing to bring it
back. It covers hover as well as always — reduce is a request
about motion, not about autoplay. The two bugs behind it were both in
the fallback: text-overflow sat on the outer span while the box that
overflows is the inline-block child, so the non-scrolling state had
never produced an ellipsis in any mode, including the default; and
moving the ellipsis to the child stops the parent overflowing, which
silently disabled overflow detection and would have stopped anything
scrolling ever again. Both measurements come from the child now. The
first was found by reading a screenshot, the second by the new test's
positive case.
Roles have to be wired to each other. combobox, listbox and
option were all present on <yj-combobox> and nothing connected them,
so arrowing through nineteen options moved a highlight and announced
nothing. Ids on the listbox and every option, aria-controls,
aria-activedescendant — and aria-selected meaning chosen, which is
the distinction the pattern rests on: the highlight is what
activedescendant points at. Unlike config-section's disclosure this
IDREF may dangle while closed, because the popup genuinely does not
exist then and aria-expanded says so. Checked against
Accessibility.getFullAXTree, not against a snapshot — and read the
whole property, since activedescendant reports value.type: "idref"
and an extraction expecting a string reports (none) on a working
build.
The queue's order is reachable from the keyboard. Alt+ArrowUp/Down
moves the focused row, with a live region saying where it went. It is
in queue-panel's own delegated keydown beside Enter and the roving
arrows, not a backend panel binding: it cannot collide with the global
Up/Down volume bindings, and a reordering key does not belong in a
user-editable table where it could be rebound onto something
unmodified. Two things in it are load-bearing. The index arithmetic
is not symmetric — MoveQueueTracks takes an index into the array
before the move, so down-by-one asks for i + 2, because i + 1 is
where the row already is once its own removal is accounted for and the
backend's contiguous-block guard correctly treats it as a no-op. And
the index comes off the row the event came from: focusedIndex was
only ever moved by an arrow key, so a row reached by a click or by Tab
left it at 0 and Enter played the first track in the queue from any
focused row.
A name is computed where the role is, and that is rarely where you
wrote it. Four surfaces wrote a name somewhere the accessibility tree
never looked. wa-slider puts role="slider" on a div in its own
shadow root pointing aria-labelledby at an empty internal <label>,
which outranks the host's aria-label — so both sliders computed a
name of "", and a11y.md lists both under what is already correct.
The name comes from label now, the library's own API, and
styles/wa-slider-label.css.ts hides it: preferred over reaching into
the shadow root the way name-dialog.ts must, because if Web Awesome
renames the part the label becomes visible and correctly named
rather than silently nameless. Its second rule is load-bearing —
#slider takes an 8px margin the moment a label exists, which grows
the bar 6px → 14px and moves the transport with it.
wa-progress-bar's label is an aria-label and is invisible, so
there it is just the right attribute.
The same thing in the light DOM: config-field rendered a <label>
as a sibling with no for, so 24 of 93 controls on Settings
computed an empty name. They use for/id (a fixed id, safe only
because each field is its own shadow root) rather than aria-label,
for what it buys beyond the name — the label text becomes a click
target. And three surfaces are named but identify nothing, which is
the same fault one step milder: three shortcut buttons announced
themselves as "S", thirty-six column arrows as "Move up", and every
queue row's remove button as "Remove from queue".
Checking any of this needs the browser's own answer, and "0 unnamed"
is not it. A placeholder is an accname fallback, so an
Accessibility.getFullAXTree sweep of all eleven views reported
Explore's search box — the audit's own a11y.26 — as clean. A sweep
for empty names cannot see a weak one.
The shell scrolls sideways and not down. body is
overflow-x: auto; overflow-y: hidden, and both halves are measured.
Vertically there is nothing to fix: the middle grid row is 1fr and
absorbs the 4em bars exactly — at 200% text on an 800×600 window the
bars go 64 → 128px, the main panel 472 → 344px, and the footer still
lands on 600. Horizontally the shell is 784px inside a 320px viewport
(400% page zoom, the width WCAG 1.4.10 names) and 464px of it,
including the job indicator and the queue button, used to sit behind
overflow: hidden. Keeping the vertical axis fixed is what keeps the
transport where a desktop player's transport belongs. At every size
this app promises, no scrollbar appears. Note that overflow: hidden
still permits programmatic scrolling, so a probe that sets
scrollLeft passes on the broken build; the spec uses a wheel gesture.
Below 600px it reflows instead, and that is the phone. The sideways
scroll above was the concession available while the shell had one
layout; plan 016 B2 gives it a second. Under 600px the grid drops its
sidebar column, <bottom-nav> takes over as the primary navigation,
the header's controls shrink or stand down, and the shell measures
exactly 320px in a 320px viewport — so layout-overflow.spec.ts now
asserts nothing needs scrolling to, which is what WCAG 1.4.10 wanted
all along. 600 rather than the sidebar's 900 because 900 is a laptop:
the answer there is a narrower sidebar, which is still a sidebar.
Three rules in it are load-bearing, and the second cost 30 specs.
A grid item's implicit minimum is its content, so one child that
insists on 580px makes the body 580px wide inside a 360px viewport
and overflow-x: hidden then hides a third of the app rather than
fitting it. Every box between the viewport and the content that must
shrink carries min-width: 0, and the things that cannot shrink say so
in their own stylesheet — search-bar's 200px floor, job-indicator's
label, audio-player's seek bar and volume. A media query inside a
shadow root is answered by the viewport, so a component states what it
drops at phone width itself rather than the shell reaching in.
A duplicated component duplicates its handles. bottom-nav's
"More" opens the same <app-sidebar> in a wa-drawer rather than
listing the destinations again — but rendering it unconditionally put a
second copy of every data-testid="nav-*" in the DOM, and 30 existing
specs failed with "strict mode violation: resolved to 2 elements" on a
desktop viewport where the element is not even visible. It renders only
while the drawer is open, and bottom-nav.test.ts asserts its absence
before that.
The tab bar is four destinations and a way to the rest. Three to five is where touch targets stop being thumb-sized; eleven over 360px is 32px each. Which four is plan 016's committed subset, and everything else — Settings included, because a phone still needs it — is behind "More".
There are three supported size bands, and the queue is part of the promise. Plan 018 (#24) wrote them down: Phone below 600 (bottom nav, reflows, fits 320px exactly), Compact 600–899 (icon sidebar), Desktop from 900 (labelled sidebar) — plus one sentence across all three, no action is ever unreachable at any supported size. The bands themselves already existed; what was new is that they are a promise and that the queue panel is inside it.
900 is the worst desktop width, not the 800×600 minimum. The
sidebar collapses to icons below 900, so the main panel is 843px at
899 and 700px at 900 — the narrowest content area any desktop width
produces is at the top of the Compact band, not at the enforced floor.
Every viewport list that stopped at "the minimum" was therefore missing
its own worst case, which is why layout-overflow.spec.ts carries 900
now. And both reasons in MinWidth's comment had expired — the
subtitle is display: none from 899 down and the sidebar host scrolls
(overflow-y: auto; at 600×460 its scrollHeight is 434 against a
332px client) — so 800×600 is a comfort floor for desktop chrome and
not a correctness one. Below it the phone layout takes over, which is
also why a very small window reflows rather than becoming a
mini-player: #12 is a second always-on-top window, not a mode of this
one, and making it a mode would discard navigation state on a resize
and put the process-level MPRIS question on a path a drag can trigger.
The queue panel is a column only while the content can spare the
width, and that cannot be a media query. In flow the host is
flex-shrink: 0, so an open queue is paid for by the main panel: it
left 379px at 900×600 (with all three of the Playlists header's actions
clipped), 69px at 390, and 0px at 320 — the content was not
degraded but gone. It goes to an overlay with a scrim when
available - panelWidth < 480, where available is
.content-area's width and therefore already accounts for the
sidebar's collapse.
Four things about it are load-bearing. The mode is computed, not
breakpointed, because the panel's width is user state — drag-resizable
200–500px and persisted — so a viewport breakpoint silently assumes the
default 320 and is wrong by up to 180px in the direction that hurts;
widening the panel at a fixed window size must flip it, and
queue-overlay-mode.test.ts is written around exactly that. 480 is a
judgement and says so: there is no cliff to derive it from (the track
list rescales continuously, 213px to 124px columns with no row
overflow), so it is anchored to keep the default 1100px window inline
and put every measured-broken case on the overlay side. The scrim
covers the content area only — not the sidebar or the transport —
because the queue is not modal, and it is subtle on a dark ramp by
arithmetic rather than by accident (33,37,41 → 18,20,23). And the
overlay is a presentation, not a fork: #55 asks for one component
with two mount points, so the roving tab stop, Alt+Arrow reorder, drag
reorder, selection semantics and virtualizer.requestUpdate() all come
along untouched. Escape closes it and returns focus, and is attached
only while the overlay is up — it is a dismissal, not a shortcut, which
is why it is not a panel-scoped binding.
What this does not fix is page-header overflowing on its own:
at 900×600 "New Smart Playlist" is still clipped to 114 of 162px with
the queue closed. That is #69, and it cannot be fixed in
page-header alone — actions arrive through <slot name="actions"> as
arbitrary light-DOM markup with their own handlers, so collapsing them
into a "More actions" menu needs an actions API (data, not markup)
across all three hosts that slot them.
The phone section of index.css is last on purpose. A media query
adds no specificity, so a @media (max-width: 599px) block placed
above the plain rules it overrides loses to them — which is how phase 1
shipped a header that kept its 2em gutters and 24px title on a 390px
phone with every declaration dead and nothing failing. The shell fitted
anyway, because the fitting is done by min-width: 0 and by each
component's own media query, which live in their own stylesheets and
have no later rule to lose to. Cosmetic declarations are exactly what
no assertion sees; a screenshot found it.
<now-playing-view> is where the seek bar and volume went. It is a
detail view (DETAIL_LOADERS, so the nav stack carries the way out —
a tab you cannot leave by pressing again is not a tab), reached from a
phone-only button over the mini player's art, and it composes the
real <seek-bar>, <player-controls> and <volume-control> rather
than reimplementing them. While it is up, index.css hides the bottom
bar through body:has(#main-content[data-active-view="now-playing"]) —
the active view is already published as an attribute, and a class
toggled from index.ts would be a second expression of the same fact.
The view therefore carries its own queue button, because that button
lives in the bar it hides.
The playing row is a shape, not a hue. track-list and
queue-panel draw a ::before triangle in each row's own left
padding, plus aria-current — before, both rows were a background tint
and a text colour and nothing else (WCAG 1.4.1). It is in the padding
because the track list's grid columns are computed from the host width,
so a marker in the flow moves every cell on the playing row and nothing
else. Both tiers assert it is absent on the other rows: a marker
that renders everywhere satisfies "the playing row has one" for free.
One thing to know before checking it — a track started from the track
list leaves the queue's currentIndex at −1, so the panel has no
current row at all in that flow, which reads exactly like the marker
not working.
The first thing Tab reaches is a skip link. Two details are
load-bearing and neither is the link's text. It is position: absolute
in both states, because body is a grid with named areas and an
in-flow extra child is auto-placed into one of them. And <main>
carries tabindex="-1", or the fragment moves the scroll, leaves the
tab sequence exactly where it was, and looks like it worked. The
subtitle beside it is a <p>, which is also what an hgroup is
supposed to contain — and dropping the <h3>'s bottom margin shortened
the flex-centred title block enough to move it down into the 4em bar's
clip, so .title zeroes both margins.
A selectable grid is a listbox. The four grids that ctrl/shift-select
(artists-view, genres-view, cover-grid, and the queue) are
role="listbox" aria-multiselectable over role="option" cards, not
rows of role="button": aria-selected on a button is invalid and is
dropped outright, so the state the whole ctrl/shift interaction exists
to produce was invisible to anything but a sighted user. track-list's
column headers carry aria-sort (Phase 1 added role="columnheader"
without it) and are activated by Enter/Space as well as by a click.
One keyboard authority. No component owns a document keydown
listener for its own shortcuts; it registers panel-scoped bindings
(autotag.*, tracklist.* in backend/shortcuts/config.go) and
claims a scope by setting shortcutScope on the mixin, which publishes
data-shortcut-scope and claims it as the ambient scope
(services/shortcut-scope.ts) while it is on screen. The shortcut
service resolves focus → panel → global, and yields a key to a focused
control that owns it (button/select/slider/checkbox, or anything inside
an open dialog) so the unmodified single-key global bindings do not
steal Space and the arrows.
A list owns the arrows it moves on, which is the vertical ones.
Granting a row/option/grid all six took ←/→ away from seeking
and gave them to nobody: track-list's own handler and
utils/roving-rows.ts both take Up/Down/Home/End and ignore
Left/Right, so a focused track row produced zero Player.Seek calls
against one per press from the body. Grant them back in
keysOwnedBy if a list ever moves horizontally.
The keys are written down in one place and shown in two.
services/shortcut-meta.ts is the label, category, scope and default
for every action; ? opens <shortcuts-overlay> and Settings edits
the same table. It used to be a private static in config-page, which
listed three of the four categories by hand — so the autotag bindings
were written down nowhere. The overlay is not a toggle: a dialog
owns every unmodified key while it is up, so a second ? never reaches
the service; Escape closes it. And a shifted character does not report
Shift (?, not Shift+?) — the character already carries it.
Two cross-cutting pieces of that UI are worth knowing before touching a list or a detail view:
utils/explore-link.tsrenders every track/album/artist name in the app. A name always navigates: to the MusicBrainz page when the entity is tagged, and to the library page for the same thing when it is not (explore-album-detailsandexplore-artist-detailsboth accept a local id instead of an MBID). It fires on a genuine single click only — the navigation is held for one double-click interval and dropped if a second click arrives, because the title is the widest thing in a row and double-clicking a row plays it. Rows do not need to know links exist.<catalog-scope-notice>is how a detail page admits what it is showing: catalog data (silent), a library stand-in while a fetch is in flight, library-only because the entity has no MBID, or a failed/ empty catalog answer with a retry. Both detail views trackcatalogPending/catalogLoadedseparately from their loading flags, since "something is renderable" and "this is the catalog's answer" are different questions.
Icons are bundled, and the app works offline. src/icons/
overrides Web Awesome's default icon library, whose resolver fetches
every <wa-icon> from ka-f.fontawesome.com at runtime — so the app
had no icons at all offline, and setBasePath() does not affect it
(only the component autoloader reads that). Overriding the library
fixes all 165 call sites without changing one of them. Three things
about it are load-bearing. The set is Font Awesome Free (CC BY 4.0,
vendored with its licence by frontend/scripts/fetch-icons.mjs)
because the kit CDN serves Pro, which cannot be redistributed. The
names are a committed list (src/icons/names.txt) rather than anything
derived, because twenty call sites compute their icon name from state
and no static pass can enumerate them. And a name that is not bundled
is therefore reported at runtime to window.__yjIconMisses and
drawn as a fallback — an e2e sweep asserts there are none — since a
missing icon used to be impossible, the CDN having had everything.
What each icon means is a second table, and it is
utils/icon-language.ts. Bundling answers "does this name resolve";
nothing answered "does this name mean what the one next to it means",
and a wrong-but-real icon renders perfectly. So plus came to mean add
to the queue, add to a playlist, make a new playlist and you do not
own this — the first two adjacent in the same context menu — while
list meant the queue, the Playlists destination and adding to the
queue.
The rule the table is built on: an icon names the noun it acts on,
not the verb. "Add to queue" and "add to playlist" are one verb on
two nouns, so the noun is what has to differ — which is why adding to a
playlist wears the Playlists destination's own icon, and why the queue
got bars-staggered and stopped wearing Playlists'. plus keeps the
one meaning it is unambiguous about, making something that is not there
yet.
Four things about it are load-bearing:
- The request toggle is one glyph in two weights
(
regular/bookmark→solid/bookmark), because two states of a toggle have to read as each other's opposite and a plus against a bookmark does not. The pair was already in the app and already right onexplore-album-details's "Request this" button while the badge forty pixels away showed a plus —utils/library-status.ts's fault one layer down, having made the two agree on what wanting means and left them disagreeing on what it looks like. - Downloads keeps the solid bookmark, deliberately. That is the same word twice, not two words: the badge says "this is on your list" and the nav item is that list.
icon-language.test.tssweeps the source, because the rule is about every call site and checking one checks nothing — the same shape asTestNoDirectRuntimeEmits. It reads everysrc/**/*.tsas raw text and fails on a literalname="plus"oricon: 'list'outside the table, and its first assertion is that it read anything at all, since a sweep over an empty glob passes.- It also asserts every
ICON_*is bundled, which closes the loop the runtime cannot:bookmark-checkis Font Awesome Pro and sat onexplore-artist-details's Follow button, drawn for every followed artist as a circled question mark.offline-icons.spec.tssweeps__yjIconMissesand could not see it, because no spec had ever followed an artist — the same faultrequested-badge.spec.tswas written for, one component over, still live. A name computed from state was only checkable from the state; now it is checkable from the table.
An album page says how much of the album is yours.
explore-album-details is a catalog page and there is no
library-side album detail page at all, so the album on it may be
wholly the user's, partly theirs, or not theirs — and its primary
action has to mean the same thing in each case. It says which: Play
when the whole release is owned, Play 7 of 12 when some of it is,
and no play button at all when none is, because a Play button that
plays nothing (or seven tracks of forty) is worse than none.
The page asks one question, once, and it is "is there a file".
Ownership used to be several claims of decreasing confidence OR'd
together — a local album id, the backend's cross-reference, a cached
MBID match, and finally any single track flagged inLibrary — none
of which is "there is a file to play", which is why the tick could be
green on an album whose every action did nothing, and why the
tracklist's context menu asked the backend on hover whether the row
it was drawing was owned. filePaths is the one answer: a map from a
displayed track to its path, filled once from updated() by a single
batched GetFilePathsByRecordingMBIDs, and read by the badge, the Play
button's count, the dimmed rows and every menu item. askedFor is a
separate set from filePaths because the guard has to be asked, not
answered — an unowned MBID never lands in the map, so guarding on the
map re-requests it on every render, forever.
The other half is that the displayed tracklist is also one thing.
buildVersionEntries synthesises the "Your Library" entry from
localTracks, so an album the catalog cannot answer for is exactly the
case that needs the version list rebuilt — loadLocalTracks guarded
that rebuild on releases.length > 0 and so rendered "No release data
available" over a tracklist it was holding in memory.
And the key it plays by is not the key it looks owned by. The local
album id is used wherever there is one, because a library-only album
has no recording MBIDs — its tracks are synthesised from
GetAlbumTracks with mbid: RecordingMBID || '' — so an MBID-keyed
lookup on an untagged library resolves to nothing and Play queues
nothing while looking entirely correct. Those synthesised tracks carry
their FilePath from the same rows, so they populate filePaths
directly and cost no lookup at all; the batched
GetFilePathsByRecordingMBIDs is what answers for a catalog
tracklist. It is the third member of the GetFilePathsBy… family: one
query, paths only, grouped so the caller keeps the tracklist's order.
It exists rather than a lookup by track id because MBTrack.LocalID
is declared and nothing in the backend ever writes it.
How much of an album is here is a question the files can answer.
ownership() above counts the displayed tracklist, which for a
library copy is a tautology — every local track has a file, so owned
always equals total and "do I have all of this" had no local answer.
The album page therefore asked MusicBrainz, and
BrowseReleases is the most expensive call the app makes: releases
plus every version's full tracklist, on a 1 req/s limiter shared with
PrefetchReleases, which fires up to eight when an artist page
renders.
The denominator was already on disk. metadata has read the "5/12"
totals off every file since forever (m.Track(), m.Disc()) and
discarded them; they persist to audio_files.total_tracks now, and
GetAlbumCompleteness sums them. A complete, MBID-matched album
makes no catalog call at all — identity from the MBID, tracklist from
the tags, which between them are what the browse was being spent on.
Three things about it are load-bearing. Totals are declared per
disc, so the expectation is a sum over discs and not one number, and
a disc whose files declared nothing leaves the whole album unknowable
rather than being covered by the discs that did. Unknown is a third
state and must render as neither — a great deal of any untagged
library has no total, and a ring drawn from its absence would mark most
of a library incomplete on no evidence; Known is what guards that,
and the badge falls back to the plain tick. And complete is >=,
not ==, because bonus and hidden tracks routinely put a folder over
its declared total and that is a complete album, not a broken one.
Owned counts distinct track numbers for the same reason in reverse:
this app detects duplicates, and counting two files of track 3 twice
would report a short album as complete.
Where the tags have no total, the catalog does. explore_index
carries a per-release-group total_tracks — ~2 bytes across 400,677
rows, about 800 kB of artifact — and completenessAnswer() merges the
two: the numerator stays local (distinct track numbers on disk) and
only the denominator is borrowed, because a catalog total describes the
canonical release while the files' own total, where they declare one,
describes the release the user actually has. Zero still means "the
catalog does not say", so an album neither side can total keeps the
plain tick.
Two rules hold up the column itself. It is counted before the
popularity filter: cmd/indexbuild counts the canonical dump's rows
per kept release, and counting only the kept recordings would say "9"
about a twelve-track album whose other three nobody has played — the
same confident lie that kept whole tracklists out of the artifact.
And adding a column to the importer's SELECT is how you break every
artifact already published, so artifactHasTotals() asks the
attached artifact whether the column is there (on the writer, where
core is attached) and selects a literal 0 when it is not — the same
shape as the encoding probe beside it.
What neither side can give is which tracks are missing, only how many — so an incomplete album still browses, and that is now the exception rather than every album load. One smaller consequence: existing databases read "unknown" until a rescan repopulates the column, which degrades to exactly the old behaviour, so nothing breaks.
And our own writers declare the total, because for a long time they
did not. tagwriter wrote track and disc numbers and dropped the
totals, so autotagging an album actively erased the evidence this
rests on: the release became MBID-matched — a green tick — while the
field GetAlbumCompleteness reads stayed absent, which is exactly the
"2 of 10 tracks, reported as in your library" the report described.
FieldTotalTracks / FieldTotalDiscs are written by the autotag apply
pass and by the download importer, and dbsync persists the track
total to the row so the album page agrees with the file without waiting
for a rescan.
Five things about it are load-bearing, and four of them fail silently:
- The total is per disc, not per release, because that is what
the tag form declares and what
GetAlbumCompletenesssums per disc — a release total written on every file multiplies a two-disc album's expectation by two, and no library can then satisfy it.backend/tagtotalsis that derivation, once, because the two callers must not import each other or the writer. - The Vorbis names are
TRACKTOTALandDISCTOTALand no other spelling.dhowden/tag's Vorbis reader looks at exactly those two keys, so a perfectly reasonableTOTALTRACKS, or a1/12insideTRACKNUMBER, is written successfully and reads back as no total at all. The tests assert the round trip through the reader the scan uses rather than through the bytes, for that reason. - ID3's number and total share one frame, so writing either alone
has to read the other off the existing tag or it silently discards
it. A total with no number is not written:
/12is what a reader parses as track 0. - The totals are written unconditionally, not on a diff. The case this exists for is a file that declares no total, which compares equal to nothing and is exactly what a "only if it changed" guard skips.
- A single-track download must not be totalled. A
RecordingMBIDanchor resolvesExpectedto that one track, so the same code would tag a track off a twelve-track album "1 of 1" — and a declared total outranks the catalog total that would otherwise have answered correctly. Confidently wrong is worse than absent here, which is the same ruleKnownexists for.
One gap this did not close, and it is older: dhowden/tag has no
RIFF reader, so nothing the tag writer puts in a WAV's id3 chunk
is visible to metadata.ExtractTags — not the totals and not the title
either. wav_test.go reads that chunk itself, which is why no test
ever noticed.
The absence is what gets marked, not the presence. The tracklist
put a green tick against every owned track and a legend underneath
explaining the tick — a positive mark on the common case, so an album
you own outright wore a column of circles and a key for them. It is the
streaming-service treatment now: rows not in the library are dimmed
in place, and nothing marks the ones that are. Two things follow.
Dimming is a colour, so it cannot be the only signal — the row carries
aria-disabled, which is what reaches anyone not seeing it. And the
dimmed rows are why the loading banner could go: tracks arriving
dimmed reads as the album filling in, so a line of text about the
page's own plumbing earns nothing. unavailable survives because it is
not about plumbing — it says rows may be missing from the page
altogether, which nothing on screen can show. (explore-artist-details
still uses loading; it has no equivalent per-row signal.)
And that treatment is the app's, not the page's.
utils/ownership.ts is the rule written once, because it was written
at eight call sites and so none of them had the whole of it: Explore's
cards, top-results-row and the artist page's three card shapes all
mixed owned and unowned with a small badge as the only difference, and
the badge on the owned ones was a green tick — the mark on the common
case this tracklist removed. Owned is plain and draws no badge at all;
unowned is dimmed, says so in its accessible name, and keeps its
request affordance; a partly-held album says how partly.
Four things about it are load-bearing.
Ownership is localId, and inLibrary is deliberately not
consulted. The album page answers with filePaths, a real file per
displayed track, and a card grid cannot afford that — but it does not
need to, because explore_index.local_*_id is built by
collectLibraryEntities from queries that every one join audio_files
and cleared by pruneStaleLocalCrossReferences, whose existence test
is a file test in all three cases. That is the same "ownership is a
file" rule computed once per scan instead of once per screenful.
in_library is written by the same pass, so the two agree in a healthy
database, but it is a one-way ratchet
(MAX(in_library, excluded.in_library)) whose only clearing pass is
gated on a non-null local id: it cannot be un-set on its own (#118).
One is a fact with an owner; the other is a flag that happens to agree.
Both explore-view and explore-artist-details additionally kept a
libraryMBIDs set that accumulated every MBID ever seen with the flag
and cleared it never, in views that never unmount; both are gone.
The two answers used to sit on one card.
renderReleaseMenuItems gates Play on release.localId > 0 while the
badge used inLibrary, so an album with the flag and no local row drew
a tick saying it was in your library, offered no Play, and — the
request item being gated on not owned — offered no way to ask for it
either. Any new surface that asks the question twice will reproduce it.
aria-disabled goes on rows and not on cards. An unowned row
cannot be activated; an unowned card still navigates to the catalog
page for it, which is a perfectly good thing to do with something you
do not own. The accessible name carries the state either way, which is
why it is one helper and not a class.
The count is batched, not looked up. store/completeness-store.ts
is credit-store one question over: request() is per-card and
coalesces a screenful into one GetAlbumsCompleteness, absence is
cached as an answer (or the albums with no totals re-ask forever), and
the whole cache is dropped on a scan, a retag or a removal rather than
aged. library-status.ts's albumBadgeFor is where that meets
Known: a total that was never declared is a plain in-library, never
a ring at 0%. One consequence in the badge itself — a partial badge
is actionable, and a control named after its action alone dropped the
count from the one state the ring exists for, so its name is both.
A partly-owned album draws the release, not the part. Once the tags
say nine of twelve, buildLibraryEntry shows the catalog's twelve
with three dimmed, rather than the nine on disk — the missing tracks
are the useful information and a tracklist trimmed to what is owned
cannot show them. It is guarded on completeness.known rather than on
"fewer tracks than the cluster", which would swap a catalog tracklist
in for every album whose tags simply never declared a total. A
side-effect worth knowing: this is what finally makes ownership()
say something true here, since counting the displayed tracklist of a
library-only entry could only ever produce "9 of 9".
And it can be asked, because the rule alone reaches too few albums.
That guard depends on two inputs the user does not control: the files
declaring a per-disc total, and the catalog's own total_tracks. Where
neither says — which is a great deal of any library, and every library
until an artifact carrying the column is published — a partly-owned
album showed only the tracks on disk with nothing to say the rest
existed. renderTracklistScope() is the explicit route: a
"Show the whole album" switch that flips the synthetic "Your Library"
entry between the local files and the release, which is the rendering
the page could already do and could only be triggered automatically.
Three things about it are load-bearing. showFullTracklist is a
tri-state, null meaning "follow the automatic rule": the rule is
right when it fires and the switch has to be able to agree with the page
it sits on rather than starting out contradicting it, which a plain
boolean would need recomputed every time the completeness answer moved
underneath it. fullReleaseCluster() falls back to the
highest-scoring cluster, because findLibraryCluster is a guess over
the inLibrary flags and returns nothing when none are set — which is
exactly the untagged library the switch exists for, so without the
fallback the control would be absent precisely where it is needed. And
it is shown only where it can change what is on screen: against the
library entry, with a release to switch to, and only when the two
tracklists differ — the same test the version dropdown answers, one
control over.
A dropdown is only a choice if the choices differ. The version
selector tested versionEntries.length, but a release group routinely
has several releases — reissues, regional pressings, a remaster — whose
tracklists are identical, and the synthetic "Your Library" entry is
often a third name for the same one, so the control appeared with every
option showing the same rows. distinctTracklistCount() is the real
test. It deliberately does not use fingerprint(), which keys on
recording MBIDs alone: a library entry built from untagged files has
none, so every such tracklist fingerprints to the same run of empty
strings and compares equal to every other. It falls back to the title,
which is what lets a local copy be recognised as the same tracklist the
catalog is describing.
Say which version you own, not that you own one. A synthetic "Your
Library" entry used to stand in for the matching release, which hid the
thing worth knowing: you could see that you owned a version but not
which, while the real release — its date, country and release count —
sat underneath under a different name. The matching release carries
inLibrary and is marked (★ and the words "in your library", since
a <select> cannot be styled per option and a bare glyph is the
unexplained symbol the tracklist's green ticks were). The synthetic
survives only where there is nothing to mark: local files matching no
release, or the no-local-album overlap guess.
A merged cluster shows the order the most releases agree on.
mergeNearDuplicateClusters folds by track set, so a resequenced
pressing — same songs, different running order — merges correctly. But
the survivor was whichever release came first in the browse response,
which is meaningless ordering. On a real album one 2021 pressing
arrived ahead of eleven 2013 ones, so the cluster wore the 2021 running
order; the user's files then matched no cluster fingerprint, and
the page both called their copy unlinked to MusicBrainz and offered a
second "version" whose only difference was an ordering almost nothing
was pressed in. withConsensusRepresentative re-picks by how many
releases share each exact ordering, earliest date breaking the tie —
and moves the cluster's fingerprint with it, since that is what the
library match is tested against. Note the consequence for the version
list: a resequence is not a separate version, because the merge folds
it before any of this runs.
A slow catalog fetch is not a failed one. The same page used to
reach unavailable — "No catalog details for this album right now" —
from a 12-second timer, which is the only signal it had, because
ensureReleasesAsync emitted AlbumReleasesReady on success and
nothing at all on failure. Against a browse queued behind eight
prefetches at 1 req/s, that reported healthy fetches as catalog
failures on correctly-matched albums. AlbumReleasesFailed is the
missing half; catalogFailed is the only route to unavailable now,
and the timer is a 60 s backstop for a genuine hang rather than the
verdict.
Activating a row plays the list the row is in, from that row. A
double-click — and Play on a single row's context menu — queues the
list as displayed with startIndex on that row, not a queue of one
track that stops when the song ends. The two playlist views and
cover-grid's album dropdown always did this; the album page and
track-list did not, so playing anything from the two largest
tracklists in the app discarded the album around it. Three rules come
with it. A menu asks how much is selected: one row is a position
and means "from here", several rows are an explicit choice of those
tracks and become the queue on their own (which is also the only case
where shuffleStart still applies, since no one row was named as the
place to start). The index is into the paths, not into the rows —
explore-album-details queues ownedFilePaths() and its dimmed rows
are not in it, so an index taken from the tracklist starts an album
somewhere else entirely, or past its end. And the index is looked up
when it is used, not remembered: selection keys are file paths
because those survive a re-sort, a re-filter and a refetch, and an
index survives none of the three — displayIndexOf is that lookup,
against cachedSortedTracks, which is the only order the user can see
and therefore the only one they can mean.
Ask for what the caller uses, once. "Play this artist" resolved
file paths with one GetAlbumTracks per album, sequentially, and every
one of the four sites doing that asked for whole track rows to read
FilePath off them — 5 genres cost 6 MB over the IPC (perf.m2).
GetFilePathsByAlbums(ids, libraryID) and GetFilePathsByGenres(names, libraryID) answer in one query and carry only the paths. They return
the paths grouped by album id / genre name, because the caller owns
the order — an album list is sorted by name, not by id, and a flattened
result would silently reorder a queue — and because cover-grid's drag
cache stores them per album. A libraryID of 0 means "every library",
matching an unset library filter.
A badge is a button only where it can act, and it says which.
library-status-indicator — the tick/hourglass/plus on every Explore
card and track row — was a <button> whose click handler was a
stopPropagation() and a comment saying to wire up the download client
later: 20 of the 66 tab stops on a results page announced themselves as
buttons and did nothing. 007 made it role="img" on the rule that a
control which cannot act is worse than none, and named the condition
that would change the answer: a <button> again with a handler,
never a handler bolted onto something already shaped like one.
It is that now, and three rules hold it up. A call site opts in by
passing request-mbid, so a redundancy is visible in the template
rather than hidden in the component — explore-album-details's header
has "Want this" in words directly below it and does not opt in. An
owned entity is never a button, because there is nothing left to ask
for, which is what stops the returned tab stops being spent on nothing.
And the name is the action and the action is a request: "Want album
X" / "Cancel the request for album X". Clicking adds a row to the
request list and nothing to the library, which is exactly what made the
original "Add … to library" a promise the control could not keep.
Two entities and not the third. A track is requestable because
EntityRecording is real work in the backend — Reconciler.tracklistFor
has a branch for it, since one expected title is what lets filename
matching score a single-track download at all. An artist is not: there
is no artist badge anywhere (top-results-row renders nothing for
one), and a discography subscription — never satisfied, expanding into
child requests — belongs on explore-artist-details's Follow button,
which can say what it commits to.
Two smaller things, both still true: a <span> does not get
box-sizing: border-box from the UA stylesheet the way a <button>
does (the badge grew 36→38px, caught by a stored screenshot, and both
branches now set it), and the click is swallowed again — for the
opposite reason to before. With no action of its own the badge was part
of its card and a click on it meant what the card means; with one, it
does not. Enter and Space are stopped for the same reason, since every
card holding one is a role="button" or role="option" with its own
handler.
Its third state was declared for a year and produced by nothing.
queued was styled amber, given an hourglass and given the sentence
"… is queued for download", and all eight call sites were a two-way
ternary — so an album already on the request list showed a plus and
said it was not in the library, on the same page as a filled button
reading "Wanted". utils/library-status.ts is that rule written once:
libraryStatusFor() (owning outranks wanting; a satisfied request is
not queued, because nothing is coming; a request is by MBID, so a track
inside a requested album is not itself requested) and toggleRequest()
beside it, because the "Want this" button asks the same question and
two definitions of what wanting means is the fault this replaced.
A grid moves by a row, and offsetTop cannot tell you how wide a row
is. utils/roving-grid.ts measured columns by counting cards sharing
an offsetTop, and every card in these grids is positioned by
lit-virtualizer with a transform, which offsetTop does not see —
so all of them reported 0, every rendered card counted as one row, and
ArrowDown was min(i + everything, last) while ArrowUp was
max(i - everything, 0). The vertical arrows were End and Home in the
albums, artists and genres grids alike, from the day it was written.
getBoundingClientRect().top, rounded, is the measurement. Two things
behind it are only visible once cover-grid splits: scrollToIndex
must pick the half that holds the index and rebase it (it was
querySelector('lit-virtualizer'), always the first), and the focus is
retried on a time budget rather than taken once at updateComplete
— a scroll of 5 000 rows produces the card a few hundred ms later, so
the tab stop moved and nothing took focus, which is indistinguishable
from the key not being handled.
A view says what it is, in one component. <page-header>
(components/page-header/) is title, count, sort and actions, and the
nine primary views use it rather than each writing its own — which is
how four came to have a heading and four not, and how the same sort
toolbar came to exist three times with different bugs. Three rules in
it are load-bearing. An empty heading is a mode, not a missing
value: cover-grid and track-list are also embedded in the artist
and genre pages, which have a heading already, so there they keep the
count and the sort and drop the title rather than growing a second
arrangement. The header renders while the view loads — a heading
that arrives with the data is the shifting layout it exists to stop —
and the count is null until there is an answer, because "0 albums"
that corrects itself a moment later is worse than saying nothing. And
the header asks for a sort, it does not perform one: the host owns
the field, the direction and their persistence, so the control cannot
disagree with the list.
And an action is data, on that same rule: the header decides what
fits, the host decides what happens. Playlists slotted three buttons
totalling 390px into a header that gets 700px at 900×600, so "New Smart
Playlist" rendered 114 of its 162px with the queue closed — and on a
phone none of them could be reached at all, which is what #69 reported.
A host passes PageAction[] ({id, label, icon, onSelect, priority, drop?}) and page-header renders each one as a button or as an item in
one "More actions" menu.
It could not have been a rule added in one place, and that is a fact
about the API rather than an effort estimate: actions used to arrive
through <slot name="actions"> as arbitrary light-DOM markup, and a
component cannot move another component's light-DOM children into a
dropdown and keep their behaviour — there is nothing generic in markup
to render as a menu item. The slot survives for markup a data list
cannot express, at the stated cost that a slotted action does not
collapse and must therefore fit at 800×600.
Six things about it are load-bearing:
- The fit is measured, never breakpointed. A ResizeObserver drives it, and each pass starts from all visible and hides the lowest-priority action until it fits — so the collapsed set is a pure function of the current width rather than of how the window got there. A rule that only ever added to the set would never give a button back, and one that adjusted by a step would need a hysteresis band to stop it oscillating on the pixel where a button exactly fits.
- "Fits" means nothing is clipped, which is not the same as the
header not overflowing. The title can ellipsis, and the moment it
can it absorbs the pressure:
scrollWidthreports a header that fits perfectly while the heading reads "Playlis…". That is this bug moved from the button to the title, invisible to the same measurement that missed it the first time — so the heading's own truncation counts as not fitting, and an action is collapsed before the title gives way. Below that, at 320px, the title is what yields: the navigation also says which page you are on, and an action has nowhere else to be said. - The measurement flips
hiddenon the rendered nodes rather than re-rendering between steps. ReadingscrollWidthforces layout, which is the point; awaiting a Lit update between steps instead lets the intermediate all-visible state paint, so the fix would flash the overflow it exists to prevent. - Priority is what a capability costs, not what a button is worth.
New Playlist is highest because it is the drop target and a closed
menu cannot be one; that is also why
PageAction.dropcarries the host's owndragover/dragleave/drophandlers rather than the header owning a notion of dropping, and why the affordance is simply absent from the overflow rather than approximated there. aria-controlsnames a panel that is always in the DOM —config-section's rule, andwa-popuphides it when inactive — and the keyboard model isMenuKeyboard, shared with every other menu in the app so this is not a second one.- It is checked per button, because
layout-overflow.spec.tscannot see this. That spec asserts the shell needs no sideways scrolling and passed on the broken build; clipping inside a component is invisible to it, which is exactly why the defect survived a spec named for it.e2e/specs/header-action-overflow.spec.tsmeasures each button against its header at 900×600, 800×600, 390×780 and 320×600, and asserts buttons plus menu account for every declared action — without that half it would pass vacuously on a build that renders no actions at all.
One thing it deliberately does not grow is a phone mode for the
actions. PHONE_COLUMN_IDS is the precedent for "what is drawn and
what can be sorted are different questions", but it exists because the
track list's columns cannot be derived from a width; these can, and a
second declaration of what a phone shows is a second thing to keep in
step. What the header does state at phone width is one word: below
600px the sort control's "Sort:" label is visually hidden — 172px of a
320px header for a label the adjacent direction arrow implies — and it
stays in the accessibility tree, because it is the select's accessible
name and hiding it outright is config-field's bug one component over.
The header search box is view-scoped, and now says so. It sits in
the app header and reads as global; typing tide on Playlists answered
"No playlists match your search" with three Tideline tracks in the
library. The scope was always real — the fix is that the placeholder
names it ("Search albums"), the page header repeats it ("Showing
artists matching ‘tide’"), and search-store holds the one map of
what each view searches. It also keeps its slot everywhere and is
disabled where it cannot serve, rather than being hidden: its
appearing and disappearing is what moved the library filter and the job
indicator on every navigation. On Explore, which has its own catalog
search, the disabled box points at it. A view that filters on the
term belongs in that map, detail views included —
smart-playlist-details narrowed its list as you typed under a
placeholder saying there was nothing to search here, because its
sibling was in the map and it was not.
The window's minimum is measured, not aspirational. MinWidth/
MinHeight are 800×600 because that is where the shell was checked to
still work: below ~780 the header subtitle wraps and pushes the title
out of the 4em bar, and below ~600 tall the eleven sidebar items stop
fitting at once. The old 512×384 promised a size at which Settings and
Jobs were unreachable — the sidebar clipped them with overflow: hidden and nothing scrolled. The sidebar scrolls now, and collapses to
its (long-existing, previously drag-only) icon mode below 900px, which
is the same breakpoint that hides the subtitle.
A row's columns must fit the row. track-list's
computeDefaultWidths shared out the host's whole clientWidth while
every row spends 24px on the favourite column and 2×8px on its own
padding first, so the grid was always exactly 40px too wide and the
last column was clipped at every size. Both numbers are constants read
by the three places that need them (the default widths, the
normaliser, and the resize handles' positions), because they were
written out separately and that is how they came to disagree.
A phone draws one column of two lines, and that is a column set
rather than a second row template. Measured on the device: at 424 px
the four configured columns fit the row exactly (--grid-cols came
out 24px 102px 101px 101px 80px) and not one of them fit its content
— "Duration" did not fit its own header. The columns were never too
wide; there were too many of them. PHONE_COLUMN_IDS is titleArtist
(title over artist, sharing the row's whole width) plus the duration, so
the row, the delegated events, the selection semantics, the playing
marker and the virtualizer are all untouched: from their side only the
number of columns changed. Three rules come with it. The row height
lives in two places and they must agree — PHONE_ROW_HEIGHT and the
CSS rule — because the virtualizer positions rows from that number, so a
taller row overlaps its neighbour. What is drawn and what can be
sorted are different questions: the page header's sort list is built
from configuredColumns, or a phone (which has no column headers
either) could sort by nothing but title and duration. And a phone's
widths are neither loaded nor saved: loadColumnWidths is keyed by
column id and fills a gap with the minimum, so the stacked column —
which nothing can ever have saved a width for — came out at 148 px
beside a duration column of 236, and saving would have replaced the
width the user dragged on a desktop for the same id.
The default columns are declared twice and must agree.
tracklist.DefaultColumns is what a fresh install persists;
DEFAULT_COLUMN_IDS in track-list/columns.ts is what the list draws
until the config arrives. Album is in both (a library manager with
duplicate detection whose rows are track/artist/duration cannot tell
its own duplicates apart) — and changing either is invisible against an
existing YJ_HOME, whose config.toml already holds the old list, so
make sandbox-seed NAME=default before believing the app.
Event-driven communication: Backend emits events via Wails runtime; frontend stores subscribe to them. Event names are constants in backend/events/.
frontend/src/events.ts is generated from backend/events/events.go
by backend/events/cmd/genevents — never edit it. It renders a const
block's doc comment as TypeScript line comments, every line of it: it
used to prefix only the first, so a comment that ran to a second
paragraph emitted bare prose into the object literal and make generate
— a pre-commit hook — produced a file that does not parse.
An event's cost is part of its meaning. TrackMetadataChanged
means the tags on disk were rewritten, which can change an album, an
artist or a genre — so library-store answers it by discarding every
cached collection and refetching. That makes it the most expensive
event in the app, and it must not be reused for something cheap:
finishing a track used to emit it, which cost ~37 MB across the IPC and
~0.8 s of blocked main thread per song at 50 000 tracks, and cleared
the user's track selection while it did. TrackPlayCountChanged
carries {audioFileId, filePath, playCount, lastPlayed} — deliberately
everything needed to patch one track in place, so no consumer has any
reason to invalidate anything. The store replaces the tracks array
(consumers key memoized filter/sort caches on its identity) while
sharing every unchanged Track, and track-list retains its
selection across a refetch rather than clearing it, since the keys are
file paths and those survive one.
The same rule reaches the other way: an event carries what a consumer
needs so it never has to invalidate. PlaylistTracksChanged carries
the playlist id, and playlist-store refetches that playlist
(GetPlaylistTracks, plus GetAllPlaylists for the summaries, since
UpdatedAt is a sort key) rather than GetAllPlaylistsWithTracks,
which is every row of every playlist — 2.6 MB and 172 ms for one heart
before the fix. It falls back to a full invalidate only where a patch
cannot be shown to be equivalent: no id (the bulk paths emit one), a
cold cache, an unknown id, or a fetch already in flight. And a store
with no subscriber fetches nothing: playlist-view is the only
reader and is created lazily, so neither the invalidation nor — more
expensively — the singleton's own construction warms a cache for a page
that may never open.
Playing a track does not wait for the database to hear about it.
Every write in this app goes through one connection —
database.DB is MaxOpenConns(1), because SQLite has one writer — and
a background pass can hold it for a long time. The player and the queue
used to write inline from paths that hold their own mutexes, so a
contended writer did not merely slow persistence down: SetQueue
blocked in LoadFile's saveState and then in persistState, while
holding q.mu and p.mu. The user's report is the exact shape of
that — the track changed and the transport sat at paused (LoadFile
had emitted TrackChanged and PlaybackStateChanged(paused), and
p.Play() is after the writes), nothing appeared in the queue
(emitQueueChanged is after them too), and the play button did nothing
because Queue.Play was waiting on the same held q.mu. It was
diagnosed by profiling the running app: 91% of its CPU was
explore.BackfillLibraryDiscographies → upsertBatch, with four more
of its six workers parked in sql.(*DB).conn.
So a write is submitted, not performed
(queue/persistwriter.go, player/persistwriter.go): jobs run in
submission order on one goroutine per component, each carrying its own
snapshot — which is what keeps "clear and rewrite the queue" and
"insert three tracks at 4" meaning what they meant when they were
called. Two rules come with it. A job must not touch the component's
fields: it holds no lock and the state has moved on, which is why
persistTracks clones. And SaveState — shutdown, and the tests —
still flushes and waits, because that is the one caller for which the
row has to exist on return.
The corollary for anything new: a durability write is not a step in a user action. If a mutation path needs the database to have finished before it returns, that is a claim worth arguing for, not a default.
"Remove from library" removes the row and excludes the path, and
never touches the file. RemoveFromLibrary(filePaths) deletes the
audio_files rows the way the scan's own orphan cleanup does (tagging
group bookkeeping, FTS entry, pruneOrphanedMetadata for an album
whose last track just went) and records each path in excluded_paths.
The exclusion is not an enhancement — without it the next scan finds
the file, sees no row and imports it again, so the button undoes itself
and is worse than no button. It is reached from the track list's
context menu behind confirmAction(), whose impact line says the
files are not deleted, and from tracklist.delete (Delete), which is
bound to opening that dialog and nothing else: one keystroke from a
focused row, a key that asks is defensible and a key that acts is not.
Four things about it are load-bearing, and two are invisible from the
track list. The soft scan compares files on disk against rows in the
database, so an excluded path — on disk, deliberately not a row —
makes the two disagree forever and queues a full scan of the whole
library on every launch; surveyAudioFiles and countAudioFiles
therefore both take the exclusion set, because they answer "how many
files would a scan import", not "how many files are there". Deleting
an audio_files row cascades to queue_tracks, so the removal calls
the same CompactQueue hook RemoveLibrary does, which reloads the
queue and unloads the player if the removed track was the one playing.
A full rescan clears the exclusions, which is the only way back for
a path removed by mistake until there is a UI for the list. And
TracksRemovedFromLibrary carries {filePaths, count} so
library-store splices the tracks array in place and refetches only
the album/artist/genre summaries — falling back to a full invalidate
only when a tracks fetch is already in flight.
Deleting the file from disk is deliberately not this, and is not foreclosed; it needs its own argument.
An unchanged payload is not an event. explore's index status used
to be pushed on a 3 s ticker for the life of the process, byte-identical
once the index was ready, and config-page assigns it to a @state
field — so a user who had once opened Settings paid a full re-render of
a 2 000-line template every 3 s, forever, for no news. emitStatus now
drops a status equal to the last one it sent, which is the rule stated
once instead of at twenty call sites. The corollary is load-bearing:
every mutation of something the status derives must call emitStatus
itself, because there is no longer a poll to notice it. si.ready
and si.cancel are both derived, and both were relying on the ticker.
A cache on a cached view needs a ceiling, and so does everything
else holding what it holds. explore-view never unmounts, and its
two art caches were plain Maps: twenty-four searches retained
20.58 MB and were still accelerating, because a cover thumbnail is a
~27 kB base64 data URL and an artist photo is a ~128 kB one. They are
LRUMaps now (utils/lru-map.ts — a Map re-inserted on read and
trimmed from the front), capped from the measured size of an entry and
kept several times larger than a screenful, since a cap below the
visible count evicts art that is still rendered and the re-render
fetches it straight back.
Two things about it are load-bearing. A cap is only a bound if it
covers every reference: the artist photo's data URL is held by both
artistImageCache and exploreCache.artists, so capping either alone
frees nothing at all and reads as a fix that did not work —
ARTIST_IMAGE_CACHE_LIMIT is exported and shared for that reason. And
a bound has to stay checkable: caches register with
utils/cache-stats.ts, so window.__yjCacheStats() reports entries,
retained chars and cap in one eval, rather than the next session having
to rebuild the twenty-four-search reproduction before it can tell
whether the ceiling still holds.
Expanding an album shows its tracks, and the code to do it was
written and never called. cover-grid's dropdown — the album's
tracks drawn between the two halves of a split grid — was reachable
only from Enter/Space on a focused card (a plain click navigates to
explore-album-details), and that path fetched the tracks over the
IPC, ran the whole split state machine and then rendered the single
grid, because render() never consulted splitMode.
connectedCallback referenced renderSplitGrid purely to satisfy
noUnusedLocals. perf.p2 files this as dead code in the bundle; it
is the only route from the albums grid to track-details.
Two things it needed that are not in the audit. The grid could not
scroll at all: .grid-scroll-container is the same markup
artists-view and genres-view use, and cover-grid had the class
with no rule for it, so the container grew to its full content height
inside an overflow: hidden host — 186 984 px of albums in a 772 px
box at 5 000 albums, unreachable by wheel, keyboard or scrollbar, and
invisible on the eight-album fixture. That is also the element
scroll-manager.ts saves and restores, so its scrollTop was
permanently 0; with a real scroller the manager works as designed
(2891 preserved exactly across an expand). And the shared context-menu
panel was labelled "Album actions" unconditionally, which nothing
could observe while the only menu that could open on a track was
unreachable.
The manager moves the scroll to reveal the dropdown rather than preserving it — on a small library that is most of the way back to the top (80 → 4, with the content taller after, so it is not clamping). "The position is preserved" is the wrong assertion; "the dropdown is on screen" is the contract.
A list pays per row, and only while scrolling. The track list's Art
column rendered CoverArtPath — the original artwork — into a 24 px
box while CoverArtSmall sat unused on the same model, and
artists-view linear-scanned every cached album per card per frame to
find an avatar fallback. Both are invisible to every test tier: nothing
renders differently and nothing fails, the app is just slower to
scroll. Pick the tier for the box you are drawing (cover-grid's
getCoverUrl() is the model), always loading="lazy" decoding="async"
on a row image, and build a lookup keyed on the store array's identity
rather than searching it — the store replaces that array when its
contents change and shares the unchanged members, which is the same
signal track-list's memoized caches key on.
The same rule, on the selection path, was the worst stall in the
app. Five components turned selected file paths back into tracks with
filePaths.map(fp => tracks.find(…)), so "Select all → Edit tags" at
50 000 tracks blocked the main thread for three to six seconds
(perf.m6). utils/track-index.ts is that lookup written once: a
WeakMap from the array's identity to a Map<FilePath, Track>, safe
for exactly the reason above and collected for free when the store
drops the array. 68 ms after.
Its neighbour is a deliberate non-fix. getSelectedKeysOrdered() walks
the list rather than the selection, which the same finding calls out —
measured at 3 ms for 50 000 items, so it stays a walk, with an early
exit once everything is found (which helps a selection near the top of
the list and, honestly, almost nothing at the bottom). The obvious fix —
keep each key's index beside it — is the one thing that cannot be done
here: an index goes stale on any re-sort, re-filter or refetch while a
file path survives all three, which is precisely why retain() drops
lastSelectedIndex and keeps the keys. Three milliseconds does not buy
a silently mis-ordered queue insert.
Work in updated() runs on every pass, so it has to say what it
depends on. now-playing measured and rewrote its text geometry
every update — six querySelectors and a read/write interleave — and
player-store notifies while playing, so it did that several times a
second about a component whose DOM had not changed (perf.m5). It now
runs only when its geometry key changes: the rendered title, the
rendered artist, the two scroll flags, or the ResizeObserver
reporting the panel resized. The scroll flags are in that list because
.will-scroll .scroll-content carries padding-right: 2em, so
applying the class changes the distance the marquee travels (−128 px
before it, −158 px after) — a guard on the text alone leaves every
first hover scrolling short, and nothing would fail. Reads before
writes in one place, so the interleave cannot come back.
Two corollaries. Cost is measured where the work runs, not where it
is written: those same reads cost 3 µs when the layout is clean and
0.103 ms when it is dirty, so the finding's magnitude only appears if
the DOM actually changed. And a drag's document listeners belong to
the drag — track-list and now-playing attach mousemove/mouseup
on mousedown and drop them on mouseup (and on disconnect, for a
drag interrupted by the component going away).
A virtualized list repaints only when you tell it to, and the
accidental way you were telling it may be the thing you are about to
delete. <lit-virtualizer>'s rows are produced by the virtualize
directive, which runs when one of the virtualizer's own properties
changes — not when its parent re-renders. So a list with memoized
items and a stable renderItem never repaints on host state, and
selection silently stops highlighting while the controller holds
exactly the right keys. Both playlist detail views virtualize now
(perf.M5: 22 090 elements and 2 000 eager cover requests for a
2 000-track playlist, against 487 and 0), and both therefore push
virtualizer.requestUpdate() on a selection change and on a
playing-track change, which is what track-list has always done.
The corollary is that artists-view and genres-view's per-render
arrow functions are load-bearing. perf.m1 asks for them to be
hoisted to stable fields the way cover-grid does; hoisting them is
what stops the virtualizer seeing a changed property, so the cards
keep whatever classes they had — measured at 1 highlighted card before
and 0 after, with no compensating win to pay for it.
frontend/test/components/card-grid-repaint.test.ts fails on that
change and exists for no other reason.
Two smaller rules from the same pass. A row inside a virtualizer needs
width: 100%, because the virtualizer positions its children
absolutely and a grid row otherwise shrinks to fit its content and
stops lining up with the header above it. And a panel that is closed
renders no list at all (perf.m7): width: 0 and contain bound the
damage but do not stop a virtualizer inside from measuring its window
on every change, or scrollToIndex from calling scrollIntoView() on
something invisible.
Emit through events.Emit(ctx, name, data...), never
app.Event.Emit. TestNoDirectRuntimeEmits fails the build on a
direct call anywhere outside backend/events.
Its justification changed with v3 and is now the weaker one. Under
v2 this was a safety rule: runtime.EventsEmit log.Fatalf'd —
unrecoverably, taking the process down — on any context not carrying
the runtime, which includes every context.Background(), so a
background worker could kill the app by emitting. That is gone. v3's
emit takes no context at all, and application.Get() with no app
running returns nil rather than dying, so Deliver is
if app == nil { return ErrNoRuntime } where it used to probe the
v2-private context key ctx.Value("events"). What remains worth
pinning is narrower and still real: one emit path is what lets
emitStatus drop an unchanged payload for every caller at once.
events.Emit keeps its ctx anyway, and it is now purely a test
seam. Delivery does not go through it; events.WithSink(ctx, rec)
does, which is how a service is asserted on in-process
(backend/queue/emit_test.go is the model). Dropping the parameter
would have churned 45 call sites and every test for no gain.
That wrapper is what makes services testable in-process: install a
recorder with events.WithSink(ctx, rec) and assert on the payload the
frontend would receive (backend/queue/emit_test.go is the model).
events.Deliver is the same call returning an error instead of
dropping, and has one legitimate caller — /__test/emit.
Naming the Wails application costs cgo, so exactly two files may.
v3's application package is GTK/WebKit bindings on Linux, and
cmd/indexbuild / cmd/indexexport are built in a plain golang
container with CGO_ENABLED=0 — the index workflow says so and it is
the one job that must not fail, since it owns the ~205 GB checkpoint.
So the single app.Event.Emit lives in backend/events/runtime_wails.go
under //go:build !indexbuild (with runtime_indexbuild.go returning
ErrNoRuntime, which is what the app itself returns before Run), and
explore's ServiceStartup — the only other thing in that dependency
tree naming application — sits in backend/explore/servicestartup.go
under the same tag. TestIndexToolsDoNotImportWails walks the dependency
graph with go list -deps -tags indexbuild and is what keeps it that
way; a ServiceStartup hook added to a package the index tools import
is the way this comes back.
Code Generation
Two generators run via go generate ./... (or make generate):
- sqlc — SQL → Go. Config at
backend/database/sqlc.yaml. Add queries inbackend/database/sql/queries/, get generated Go indatabase/sql/sqlcgen/. - templ —
.templfiles →*_templ.gofiles (same directory).
Pre-commit hooks verify generated code is fresh — always run make generate after changing .sql or .templ files.
Code Style
-
Go: golangci-lint v2 with strict linters including
err113(static errors),nlreturn,wsl_v5(whitespace),godot(comment periods),sloglint,perfsprint. Imports grouped: stdlib → third-party →yellowjacket/...(enforced by gci). -
TypeScript: Strict mode, no implicit any, no unused locals/parameters.
-
Commits: Conventional Commits, enforced by
scripts/commit-check.sh— a lefthookcommit-msghook locally, and a CI step over every commit in a push. It is twenty lines of shell rather than commitlint, because the grammar is one regex and commitlint would mean a Node dependency tree at the root of a Go repo. Its type list is.releaserc.yml's; keep the two in step or semantic-release will decline to release something the check accepted..releaserc.ymlis what runs now, fromrelease.yml, and it is why the commit grammar is load-bearing rather than decorative: a merge tomainwhose commits are allchore/ci/docsreleases nothing, and a mistypedfeatships a minor version.make release-dryanswers "what would this merge release" without pushing.The analyzer reads the type and ignores the scope, so a CI-only change is
ci:and neverfix(ci):. The scope is decoration;fixis a patch whatever is in the brackets. Two commits touching nothing but.gitea/workflows/unclaim.ymlwere writtenfix(ci):and cutv0.2.1andv0.2.2— real releases, published to Arch, Homebrew and the APK registry, containing no user-facing change. They were left in place rather than deleted, because a version that vanishes is worse for whoever pulled it than one that turns out to be empty.The blast radius is bigger than the version number, which is what makes this worth a paragraph. A merge to
mainstarts two workflows; ifrelease.ymlthen pushes a tag, that tag push starts four more (arch-package,homebrew-formula,android-apk,desktop-assets) — on a runner with capacity 1, where the APK build alone is tens of minutes.make release-drybefore merging is how you find out, and it is cheaper than every one of those.@semantic-release/githubis not in that config and must not be. Gitea's API is/api/v1and is not GitHub's surface, so@semantic-release/execcallsscripts/gitea-release.shinstead — onePOST, which is the whole of the Gitea-shaped work. The community plugin (@saithodev/semantic-release-gitea) was considered and rejected: last published 2022, ongot@10, declaring no peer dependency on semantic-release at all.Two things in it fail silently and are therefore pinned with their reasons. The notes come from
CHANGELOG.md, not from an argument: release notes are rendered commit messages — arbitrary text carrying backticks, quotes and$— so templating${nextRelease.notes}intopublishCmdwould be a shell injection whose input is the commit log. Andconventional-changelog-conventionalcommitsis held at 9, because at 10 it is quietly incompatible with the writerrelease-notes-generator@14pulls in: every release note renders as a bare## 0.0.1 (date)heading with no sections and no commits beneath it, no step fails, and the release ships with an empty body. Check the rendered notes, never the exit code.
Testing
Tests use database.NewTestDB(t) for in-memory SQLite, built by the same
applySchema production uses so the two cannot diverge. Test audio fixtures live in test_data/music_library_test/. Table-driven tests are the norm.
Git Workflow
Feature branches and PRs are the only way in: main is a protected
branch (enable_push: false, an empty push whitelist, and CI / check*
CI / e2e*as required status checks), so a direct push is rejected by the pre-receive hook. This file said otherwise for a long time. Tags are not protected, which is what letsrelease.ymlpush one.
A branch answers a claimed issue — see "Issues" above. The commit grammar is unchanged and is load-bearing for a different reason (semantic-release reads it), so the issue number lives in the branch name and the PR body rather than in the commit subject.
A batch of small fixes can be one PR, which is what #83 did: eight
branches preserved as merges under one integration branch, so
authorship survives and the batch lands as one release rather than
eight. The cost is that its Closes list has to be checked afterwards
— it half-worked.
Pre-commit runs vet, lint, codegen check, and frontend typecheck in parallel. Pre-push runs the full test suite.
CI
Eight workflows in .gitea/workflows/. Five of them package and
publish (arch-package, homebrew-formula, index-artifact,
android-apk, desktop-assets); release.yml decides whether four of
those run at all; unclaim.yml is housekeeping on the tracker and
touches no code; only ci.yml gates, and it is the one to look at when
deciding whether a push was healthy.
release.yml is the entry point for all of it, and it is triggered by
hand. It reads the Conventional Commits since the last tag and, if any
is releasable, writes the changelog, pushes the tag and creates the Gitea
release whose body is that changelog section. arch-package,
homebrew-formula, android-apk and desktop-assets are all keyed on
v*, so the tag push is what starts them — the version, the notes
and the packaging are still nobody's manual work; when is the only
decision left to a person.
It used to fire on every push to main, which made the trigger "a PR
was merged". That is a version per unit of work rather than per
shipment: eight releases in twenty-two hours (v0.0.1 → v0.3.1) for
one session, each fanning out to four publishers on a runner with
capacity 1 — ~40 packaging jobs to ship three issues, with ordinary PR CI
queued behind them. Nothing else had to change to batch them, because
semantic-release already reads every commit since the last tag: five
fixes and two feats become one minor release with all seven in the
notes. Release frequency was only ever how often the workflow fired.
This is the same rule index-artifact.yml states — a job that mutates
state which cannot be rebuilt in ten minutes is triggered deliberately,
not by a push — and the two are now the only workflows with no push
trigger. A schedule was considered and rejected: a cron batches without
anyone having to remember, but it puts the decision back on a timer,
which is the thing being removed. A beta integration branch was
considered and rejected too (#115): it relocates the trigger rather than
removing one, needs a second protected branch carrying the same required
checks, and adds a full check + e2e run per batch on the very
runner whose queue is the complaint.
dry_run is why the manual trigger is usable. The point of pulling
a lever by hand is being able to look first, so the dispatch takes a
flag that runs semantic-release --dry-run: the version and the notes,
no tag, no release, no publishers. Anything but the literal string
true releases for real — a typo in a dispatch box must not silently
turn a shipment into a green no-op.
A prerelease tag is not a shipment, and all four publishers now say
so. Their trigger is v*, which matches v0.4.0-beta.1; they guarded
v0.0.0 and nothing else. Nothing produces a prerelease today — the
guard is there because the thing that would is prerelease: true in
.releaserc.yml, one line whose blast radius is a public Homebrew tap
and a credential-free APK registry that Obtainium polls. android-apk
is the worst of the four twice over, since its versionCode maths
splits on dots and would read 1 out of 0-beta — a wrong number
rather than a failed build, and Android refuses anything not greater
than what is installed.
Four things about it are load-bearing:
- The tag is pushed with a user PAT, not the Actions token. Gitea,
like GitHub, does not start a workflow from a ref pushed by a
workflow's own token (go-gitea#33123). The token is what decides this,
so
PACKAGE_TOKENis handed to semantic-release as therepositoryUrlcredential and the push is attributed to a person. - That same limitation is used deliberately, once. semantic-release
calls the first release of a tagless repo
1.0.0and offers no way to say otherwise, so av0.0.0floor tag is what makes the first release0.0.1— and it is pushed with the Actions token precisely so it triggers nothing. All four publishers additionally skipv0.0.0explicitly, cleanly rather than by failing, because a floor is not a shipment. - The release page is the changelog, and that follows from the branch
protection.
@semantic-release/gitwould push achore(release):commit back tomain, which the pre-receive hook rejects — after the tag had been pushed, leaving a tagged release the run then reports as failed. Whitelisting the CI user was the alternative and was declined: it weakens a protection someone set on purpose and lets a bot push tomainwithout the checks every human PR passes. So the plugin is absent,@semantic-release/changelogwrites to a gitignored.release-notes.mdpurely to carry the notes intoscripts/gitea-release.sh, andCHANGELOG.mdis a signpost to the releases page rather than a file that would silently stop updating. The workflow keeps itschore(release):guard anyway, for the day someone adds the plugin back. - An asset upload waits for the release to exist. semantic-release
pushes the tag in
prepareand creates the release inpublish, so the tag push that starts these workflows happens before there is a release id to attach to.scripts/release-asset.shpolls for it. The capacity-1 runner serialises things enough that this would usually work by accident, which is the worst kind of bug.
Releases restarted at 0.0.1, which is a downgrade on every channel.
pacman and Homebrew both silently offer no upgrade from the old 1.x,
and Android refuses the install outright — its remedy is an uninstall
that takes the user's library. This was chosen over pacman's epoch and
over offsetting versionCode, on the grounds that both are permanent and
a reinstall is once. packaging/homebrew/README.md and
docs/android-release.md say so where a user would look.
desktop-assets.yml publishes Linux and nothing else, and macOS is not
an oversight. GOOS=darwin CGO_ENABLED=0 fails at
wails/v3/pkg/mac: build constraints exclude all Go files — the darwin
backend is Objective-C behind cgo, so a .app needs a macOS host and the
runner is a Linux container. That is exactly why the Homebrew formula
builds from source on the user's own Mac. Windows does cross-compile
cleanly (GOOS=windows CGO_ENABLED=0, a couple of seconds — oto uses
WinMM through x/sys, sqlite is modernc's pure-Go driver, WebView2 is
COM syscalls, MPRIS is linux && !android-tagged) and is deliberately
not published: no Windows build of this app has ever been run, and no
tier here can exercise one.
android-apk.yml is the one that can lose something irrecoverable. It builds the signed
arm64-v8a APK (the only ABI Android can run this app on — see
app/build.gradle) on every v* tag and publishes it to the generic registry, which is
readable without credentials — the reason Obtainium can poll a plain
URL. Android refuses to update an app whose signing certificate
changed, and the only remedy is an uninstall that takes the user's
library with it, so the job refuses to build without the keystore
secret rather than falling through to Gradle's debug-key default, and
refuses to publish an artifact whose certificate says CN=Android Debug. It is deliberately not a job in ci.yml: that workflow runs on
every branch push, this one takes tens of minutes on a cold cache, and
the runner has capacity 1. docs/android-release.md is the operating
document.
Two jobs, both in an ubuntu:24.04 container:
check— no display:make commit-checkover the push's commits,make lintandmake test(three build configurations each),tsc --noEmit,make ui-test,make bindings-check,make skill-check.e2e— under a private D-Bus and no display at all, since v3's-tags serveris a real headless mode: fixtures, a seed built by running the app (curlagainst the runtime endpoint — no browser),make dev-headless, then the Playwright suite against both Chromium and WebKit. Playwright's Linux WebKit links Ubuntu 24.04 libraries that Arch does not provide, so CI is the only place it can run, and it is the closest available approximation of the WebKit2GTK renderer that ships. The WebKit step carriesif: ${{ !cancelled() }}, without which a chromium failure skips it — which is how the one source of WebKit signal came to produce none for two sessions while the plan recorded it as "unverified".
A failing job's log is readable, and gitea_ci job_logs is not the
only way. That endpoint 404s on this Gitea build; the REST API does
not. GET /api/v1/repos/{owner}/{repo}/actions/runs/{run}/jobs gives
per-step status (which is how "WebKit was skipped" was found) and
GET /api/v1/repos/{owner}/{repo}/actions/jobs/{job_id}/logs returns
the whole log, with Authorization: token $GITEA_TOKEN.
Two things the container needs that a developer machine does not.
It needs an audio device that keeps time, because the player's
position is derived from what has been consumed — so a device that
accepts audio instantly makes every track finish instantly and the
clock never move. That is what ALSA's null plugin does, contrary to
a year of this file and ci.yml saying it paces on a timer: measured
through beep and oto with player.InitSpeaker's own arguments,
3000 ms of audio consumed in 2.96 ms. It is a PulseAudio null sink
now (the same 3000 ms takes 3762 ms), started in system mode because
the job runs as root, with a step that plays three seconds and fails
if they take under two — a dependency with a rate, checked like one.
And
YJ_CORE_INDEX_URL points at a dead address so no run fetches the real
explore artifact, matching what scripts/seed-sandbox.sh already does.
make lint's tag sets must stay identical to make test's, or
lint is checking configurations nothing builds. There are three, and
the app's is now the default tag set: v3 resolves GTK4 +
WebKitGTK 6.0, which Arch and ubuntu:24.04 both ship, so the
webkit2_41 tag that used to be mandatory everywhere is gone. A
machine without webkitgtk-6.0 can still build with -tags gtk3, but
that is an escape hatch, not what CI or a release builds.
Packaging
The Makefile is the front door and Taskfile.yml is an
implementation detail behind it. make dev, make build-dev,
make build-prod, make bindings and make e2e all keep their names;
what changed underneath is that a build is now a Taskfile tree
(Taskfile.yml → build/<platform>/Taskfile.yml) rather than one
wails build invocation, and wails3 is still a vendored Go tool
(go tool wails3), never a global install.
Four things about that tree bite anything outside the Makefile, and all four bit the packaging recipes:
- The tasks invoke
wails3by bare name, in 54 places across the scaffold files.scripts/toolbin/wails3puts that name on PATH pointing back at the vendored tool; without it a build dies at its first sub-task withwails3: command not found. The Makefile prepends it, and so mustpackaging/arch/PKGBUILDand the Homebrew formula. wails3 buildhas no-ldflags,-trimpathor-clean— those were v2's.-trimpathand-w -sare already in the production task's own flags; the version stamp goes throughLDFLAGS_EXTRA, this repo's one edit to the scaffold Taskfiles (linux and darwin alike), passed aswails3 task build LDFLAGS_EXTRA="-X 'main.version=…'".- The output is
bin/, not v2'sbuild/bin/.build/is tracked build assets now. - Bundling is a separate step from building.
task buildproduces a bare binary on every platform; the macOS.appistask package.
build/'s platform metadata is generated from build/config.yml.
wails3 task common:update:build-assets rewrites Info.plist, the
.desktop template, nfpm.yaml and the Windows manifest from that
one file — so a hand edit to any of them is lost on the next refresh.
nfpm's homepage and license say in place that the refresh does not
own them, and that comment is wrong: a refresh reset them to
https://wails.io and MIT. Re-check those two after any refresh.
That refresh does not touch the mobile trees, contrary to what this
file said for five phases. update build-assets extracts only
updatable_build_assets (darwin/ios/linux/windows); build/android/
and build/ios/ come from generate build-assets, which rewrites the
whole of build/. So build/android/ is committed and hand-edited
like source — it was generated once into a scratch directory and
copied across (plan 015), it carries one deliberate edit to its
Taskfile.yml, and only its output is gitignored. build/ios/ is
still not carried and its includes: entry is still dropped.
Its MainActivity owns the safe area, because targetSdk 35 does
not leave that to the theme. Android 15 lays every app out
edge-to-edge and ignores the statusBarColor/navigationBarColor the
scaffold's theme sets, and the WebView is match_parent, so the page's
bottom band — the transport and, on a phone, the tab bar — would be
drawn under the gesture bar. applyWindowInsets() pads the container by
systemBars | displayCutout | ime and returns the insets rather than
consuming them; the window background is black to match the app's own
ramp, since that padding is what shows through. It is pre-emptive:
the phone this was checked against is Android 14, where the system still
insets the window, and the enforcement applies to an app running on
15. No browser tier can see this class of fault either way — a viewport
has no system bars.
And a device is an engine, not just a screen. The phone this app was
first run on renders in Chrome 113 — two years behind every browser
any other tier uses — at a 424x439 CSS px viewport. It has :has(),
color-mix() and dialog.showModal(); it does not have relaxed CSS
nesting (Chrome 120, so a nested rule beginning with a bare element
selector is silently dropped), the Popover API (114, which Web Awesome's
popups set popover="manual" for), light-dark() or relative colour
syntax. So "it renders at that size in Chromium" is not evidence about
the phone, and resizing a spec cannot recover the missing signal. make android-inspect forwards the WebView's devtools socket and make android-eval asks the real page — raw CDP, because connectOverCDP
calls Browser.setDownloadBehavior and a WebView refuses it.
build/config.yml's version is the
metadata version and is not what the app reports — main.version is
stamped at link time from the packaging recipe's git-derived version.