removeProcess deletes filepath.Join(daemonRoot, name) whole; a process named ".." made that
/var/lib/mesh. The declaration and the removal now hold the name to one rule.
Found by being asked whether processes and containers handle environment the
same way. They do not, and the difference is not cosmetic.
Docker passes --env through literally. A unit file reads three things out of a
value that nothing else does, and a module's environment routinely contains all
three because a generated password is arbitrary bytes:
- % begins a specifier. %H is the hostname. A password containing one is
silently replaced, and it fails later as an authentication error nobody can
explain by reading the declaration.
- whitespace separates assignments. Unquoted, K=a b sets K to "a" and reads
"b" as another assignment.
- a newline ends the line, and what follows is read as a unit DIRECTIVE.
The first two are escaped: quoted, with quotes and backslashes escaped and
percent doubled. The third cannot be — a unit's environment has no way to carry
a line break — so it is refused in validation, near whoever wrote it. Without
that, an environment value could write ExecStart= and have the machine run
something nobody declared.
Ordinary awkward values stay accepted, because refusing those too would leave a
module unable to hold a generated password.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01D6qtiYU3P9jk3pnAXyAFyx
The first cut of this added a `daemon` for the long-running case alone. That
would have meant a new vocabulary entry for each of the others — a scheduled
task, a run-once migration, a health check — when they are one thing run at
different cadences. That is a field, not four entries in a vocabulary where every
entry widens what a compromised control plane can express.
So it mirrors a container exactly, because it IS a container's twin: the same
intent, hosted by the machine's own supervisor instead of a runtime. Stays up,
runs once, or runs on a schedule.
Tools, hooks and event consumers are not further modes. They are loaded by a tool
host, which is itself a process that stays up — so the generic case already
covers them, which is the test of whether it is generic.
A scheduled process gets a timer and a unit that finishes; a long-running one
gets a unit that is restarted when it exits. Getting that wrong either way is a
second copy running continuously between fires, or a schedule that never fires.
The modes are exclusive and validation says so near the author: something that
runs once does not run on a schedule, and something not running between fires
cannot be restarted when a file changes.
A missed fire happens when the machine comes back rather than being skipped,
which is the difference between a machine that was down and a schedule that
quietly stopped.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01D6qtiYU3P9jk3pnAXyAFyx
jochen
jschoubben