Nomarchy/agent/BACKLOG.md

# Backlog — the prioritized task queue

**This is the only executable work list for agents.** Product themes and
v1.0 intent live in [`docs/VISION.md`](../docs/VISION.md); design history
in [`docs/ROADMAP.md`](../docs/ROADMAP.md); map in
[`docs/README.md`](../docs/README.md) and [`agent/README.md`](README.md).

**Rules:**
- Agents take the topmost actionable item (see LOOP.md). Finished items
  are **deleted** here — the journal + git log are the record; durable
  design notes get a ✓-entry in docs/ROADMAP.md (and/or a note in VISION)
  if worth keeping.
- Item numbers are **stable IDs** — never renumbered or reused. A gap in
  the sequence means shipped (or dropped) work; new items take the next
  free number regardless of tier.
- Tags: `[blocked:hw]` needs real hardware (see HARDWARE-QUEUE.md) ·
  `[human]` needs Bernardo · `[stuck]` two failed attempts, needs help ·
  `[big]` must be split before starting.
- Agents may append to **PROPOSED** and **Decisions** freely (include
  `VISION § …` or `ROADMAP § …` when relevant); only Bernardo moves items
  *out* of PROPOSED into the tiers.

---

## NOW

### Live ISO / install hardware findings — Acer Aspire M5-481T + Dell XPS 9350

Bernardo, real installs 2026-07-13–14 (photos of the install end screens and
post-boot sessions). Preserve separation: the installer bake failure and the
flake pin are different root causes even when they show up on the same machine.
(Terminal / Ghostty-on-Acer → shipped as Kitty-only, #95.)

## NEXT

### 151. `[human]` v1 launch plan — devise with Bernardo (includes the GitHub move)

Bernardo, 2026-07-17: before tagging v1, sit down and devise the launch plan.
Known ingredients, so that session starts concrete:
- **The repo moves to GitHub.** Everything baking the Gitea URL follows: the
  downstream template's `inputs.nomarchy.url`, the `nomarchy-wallpapers`
  input URL (baked 2026-07-17 — sweep it in the same move), README/docs
  links, and CI (eval CI runs on Gitea act_runner — decide GitHub Actions
  vs keeping Gitea CI on a mirror).
- The move is the natural moment for the **history-rewrite decision**, and
  it is now measured (2026-07-17): the 107 MiB pack is 94.2 MB wallpaper
  blobs + 9.9 MB preview generations; all 848 commits of *text* pack to
  ~15–20 MiB. So the history is not long-heavy, it is image-heavy.
  Recommendation on the table: **filter, don't reset** —
  `git filter-repo` stripping only `themes/*/backgrounds/` keeps every
  commit's diffs/blame/`log -S` (load-bearing: it diagnosed #147) at a
  ~15–20 MiB clone. Cost: all SHAs change, and ROADMAP/journal cite them —
  mitigate by freezing the Gitea repo as a read-only archive (old SHAs
  resolve there; stash filter-repo's commit-map in it) + one ROADMAP note.
  Argue against a full mirror (ships 94 MB of deleted images to every
  clone forever) and against fresh-start (burns the archaeology to save
  ~15 MiB).
- The existing v1 bar (VISION § v1.0): HARDWARE-QUEUE burn-down, install P0
  re-verify before the `v1` fast-forward, visual ritual. LICENSE shipped
  (MIT, 2026-07-17).
- Adjacent calls that may fold in: cachix/public binary cache (#120's
  prerequisite), the netinstall decision itself, release notes/announce.

`v1` stays human-only throughout — agents prepare evidence and checklists,
never the tag or branch.

## LATER

- **Pre-built theme variants** (ROADMAP § Faster switches follow-on): if
  `home-manager switch` itself is still the theme-switch bottleneck now
  that the wallpapers split shipped (2026-07-17), pre-build each theme's
  generation so a switch just activates a cached one. Measure first.
- **Installer round 2** (ROADMAP § Installer): multi-disk BTRFS RAID,
  impermanence, BIOS/legacy boot.
- **Boot-from-snapshot**: a systemd-boot equivalent of grub-btrfs.
- **MIPI/IPU software-ISP camera** support (no-UVC machines).
- **NixOS release bump → v2** `[human]`: deliberate, hand-edited, never
  automated; the previous attempt was discarded (2026-06-22) over a
  Hyprland OOM blocker — see MEMORY.md before retrying.

## FUTURE (decided deferred — not the agent queue head)

Work we **intend** someday but explicitly **not** NEXT. Agents do not
pick these unless Bernardo promotes one into NEXT/NOW.

### 20. KVM runner → VM suite in CI `[human]`
**Status (2026-07-10):** keep **eval-only** CI on the current Gitea
stack (act_runner in docker-compose on the 4c/4 GB IONOS VPS). Nested
KVM + RAM headroom on that host are a poor fit next to Gitea; full
`checks.*` VMs stay local / promotion-time until a **separate**
KVM-capable machine exists.

**When ready:** register a second runner (host-mode nix + `/dev/kvm`,
label `nix-kvm` — not the existing docker eval runner), then uncomment
the `vm-checks` job in `.gitea/workflows/check.yml` (`runs-on: nix-kvm`,
`nix flake check` + toplevel/HM builds). Do not enable the job until
that label is online (Gitea queues forever otherwise).

### Formatter — adopt later `[human]`
**Intent:** add a Nix formatter (likely `nixfmt-rfc-style`) in a dedicated
pass: reformat the tree once, document in CONVENTIONS, optional CI
check. **Not** the queue head — no drive-by reformats until that pass.

## PROPOSED (agent suggestions — await human triage)

*Agents: append here with a one-paragraph pitch (what/why/cost). Do not
implement. Bernardo moves accepted items into a tier.*

*Open work only. Shipped exam/A–C items (#47–#63, #14, #52 theme
high-ROI, etc.) live in the journal + ROADMAP — not here.*

### Product / day-2

### 153. Desktop widgets (clock / system stats) as an opt-in per-theme surface

Pitch (filed while shipping the three exclusive theme pairs, 2026-07-18):
themed desktop widgets — a clock, calendar, or system-stats panel living on
the wallpaper, conky-style — would deepen the identity themes (imagine
kiln's copper stats panel or executive-ivory's letterhead clock). No such
surface exists today, so it is a NEW theming surface: per CONVENTIONS it
must consume the palette from the state JSON (no side pipeline) and ship
as an opt-in `nomarchy.*` toggle with a commented template example. Engine
choice is the real decision — conky is X11-era; a Wayland layer-shell
widget system (eww or a small QML/GTK layer-shell tool) fits the stack
better. Cost: moderate (engine spike + palette bridge + 2–3 widget
layouts; start with the exclusive pairs only, not all 28 themes). Value:
v1+ polish, not a v1 blocker.

### 146. `[watch]` hypridle hangs instead of exiting when its compositor vanishes

**Rewritten 2026-07-16, hours after filing: the premise was disproven and almost
nothing survives.** As filed it said hypridle "dies silently ~2×/week — 19 times
in 11 days", with Jul 14 as the clean example ("`CRITICAL` at 13:08:17, then
eleven hours of silence"). Every number there was an artifact of the
measurement. **18 of the 19** `Disconnected from pollfd id 1` lines are
hypridle's noisy goodbye while systemd *deliberately stops it* — each bracketed
by `Stopped hypridle` / `Started hypridle` with a healthy replacement seconds
later. The "eleven hours of silence" came from grepping **one PID**: systemd
logged `Stopped hypridle` 13:08:17, `Started hypridle` 13:09:00, and PID 1678
ran fine all evening where the filter could not see it. Do not re-derive the old
rate; it counts normal shutdown noise.

**What is real, and it is small.** Exactly one genuine zombie has been observed
(2026-07-16 17:25:39), verified by process inspection rather than logs — `ps`
(alive 9h36m), `ss` (48 KB unread on its D-Bus socket, i.e. not reading),
`NRestarts=0` while `systemctl --user is-active` said `active (running)`. That
is upstream hyprwm/hypridle#171 ("Possible deadlock in pollThr when compositor
exits?", open since 2025-09, in neither 0.1.7 nor main) and it is a true bug:
hypridle hangs rather than exits, so `Restart=always` never fires.

**A second real one joined it with #127's close (2026-07-17):** an
inhibit-lock underflow (`BUG THIS: inhibit locks < 0: -1`, hypridle's own
words, Jul 15 10:36:29) left the fired DPMS listener's `on-resume` permanently
dead on 0.1.7 — the incident's actual mechanism (ROADMAP § "The idle brick's
CAUSE found"). Reported upstream with the full trace 2026-07-17:
https://github.com/hyprwm/hypridle/issues/208
(#74/#104/#128 are the same class, closed before 0.1.7 evidently without
killing it). Its impact path here is closed by the compositor-side wake fix
(a2151f4); same watch posture — take the upstream fix when a release carries
it.

**But its impact path is closed, which is why this is `[watch]` and not work.**
The zombie only *persists* if systemd never stops the unit — which needed the
user manager to survive logout, i.e. the stray pre-migration linger removed in
#147. Without linger, logout tears the manager down and takes any zombie with
it; the Jul 14 trace above shows the healthy path (`Stopped` → `Started`) doing
exactly that. A Hyprland death ends the logind session anyway (2026-07-16:
`Session 2 logged out` → greeter), so there is no known route left to a
surviving zombie.

**Do before building anything:** re-measure. Count only disconnects with **no**
`Stopped/Started hypridle` around them and **no** logind session event, and
confirm by `ps`/`ss` that the process is really wedged — not by grepping a PID.
If that count is zero over a few weeks post-linger, **close this unbuilt**. If it
is not, the upstream issue has sat ten months on vaxerski's "that will cause a
segfault no?" and a reproducer would be worth more than a local guard.

### 150. Extract the display-transition tool — idle.nix carries a lossy copy under the same name

Found by the 2026-07-17 structural audit. `modules/home/idle.nix:23-53` defines
`miniTransition`, a ~22-line `writeShellScriptBin` named
**`nomarchy-display-transition`** — the same binary name as the real ~175-line
tool in `modules/home/hyprland.nix:136-310` — implementing only
`undock|enable`, with none of the full tool's safety: no logging, no
lid-inhibitor gate, no `restore_keyboards`, no workspace moves, no
failure dump. The comment says why: "a mini transition avoids a circular
import on hyprland.nix". No PATH collision today (the mini is never installed;
it is baked by store path into hypridle's wake tool via `display-tools.nix`),
but nothing asserts the two stay behaviourally consistent, and this is the
subsystem where #100/#142/#148 all lived. Pitch: extract the full tool into
its own module file (e.g. `modules/home/display-transition.nix`) imported by
both hyprland.nix and idle.nix, delete the mini, re-run the
`tools/monitor-fallback.nix` harness + `checks.docking-ux` as the V2 gate.
Cost: a focused refactor of safety-critical code — deliberately NOT done as
hygiene drive-by; deserves its own iteration.

### 149. `[watch]` Waybar's exec-once workaround may be defending against nothing post-linger

Spun out of #147 (shipped 2026-07-17) so its loose thread survives the entry:
`modules/home/hyprland.nix` runs Waybar from `exec-once` rather than a systemd
unit because the unit "raced Hyprland's IPC on a **warm** relogin ... never
retried, so the bar vanished" — and a warm relogin is exactly what linger
created. With the stray linger removed (2026-07-16) that workaround may be
defending against nothing. Do not rip it out on this note alone: it works, and
the claim needs a real relogin without linger to test (V3 — the same relogin
that verifies #148's watcher fix would answer it).

**2026-07-18 evidence: the warm relogin is real post-linger.** On the dev
box the user manager survived a Hyprland logout (the tty1 greetd session
keeps it alive — no linger involved) and the teardown broke:
`graphical-session.target`'s stop transaction was rejected as destructive
(easyeffects had a queued start job), the target stayed active,
cliphist/swaync/portals/swayosd crash-looped against the dead Wayland
socket into `start-limit-hit`, and the relogin's plain `start` was a no-op
— doctor red for the whole session. Session bring-up now stops stale
targets + `reset-failed` before starting (`hyprland.nix`
systemd.extraCommands); relogin V3 check queued in HARDWARE-QUEUE. The
exec-once posture this entry watches is therefore still earning its keep.

### 120. A netinstall ISO, next to the fat offline one

**Deferred to PROPOSED 2026-07-16 (Bernardo): not now.** Nothing below is
stale — the measurements stand and the decision it needs is unchanged. It sits
here because it is the only genuinely large item left, and because the gotcha
at the bottom (no binary cache for our own derivations) probably makes a
cachix the real first step, not the ISO.

Bernardo 2026-07-14, after seeing the measured size: **keep the current ISO
exactly as it is** — the guaranteed offline install is the feature it buys —
and ship a **much lighter netinstall variant alongside it**. Two products, one
distro: "works on a plane" and "8 GiB is absurd to download" are both true, and
a second target settles them without compromising either.

**Measured facts (2026-07-14), so this starts from numbers, not vibes.**
*(These stand as measured: #121 would have cut ~0.67 GiB of duplicate chromium
from them, but it was **reverted** — decided against, ROADMAP § one chromium,
not two. If a netinstall ships, revisit it: the duplicate is worth ~195 MiB of
**download**, which is this item's whole currency, even though it is worth
almost nothing on disk or on the ISO.)*

> **Read this before using the numbers below.** They are **closure arithmetic**,
> and #121 proved the hard way that closure size is neither disk size nor image
> size: removing a 687 MiB path shrank the ISO by **8 KiB**, because
> **mksquashfs dedupes duplicate files** and **`auto-optimise-store` hardlinks**
> them on disk. So a change that looks like it sheds gigabytes of closure can
> shed nothing off the actual image. **Measure the artifact — build the ISO and
> `stat` it.** The corollary cuts the other way and is the good news for this
> item: what dedupe cannot help is the **wire**, so a netinstall's download is
> the one figure closure/NAR size predicts honestly (`nix path-info --store
> https://cache.nixos.org --json` gives the real `downloadSize`).
- Current ISO **8.078 GiB** compressed; **18.03 GiB** of store uncompressed
  (`zstd -19`, 2.23:1 — compression is already near-max, not the lever).
- The offline pin (`system.extraDependencies`, 60 roots: a representative
  installed system + the template HM closure + all flake inputs) is **4.02 GiB
  uncompressed of that — only ~22%**. Dropping it entirely still leaves a
  **~13.3 GiB** desktop → roughly **6 GiB** compressed at the same ratio.
  **So "no pin" alone is NOT the lighter ISO** — this is the trap to avoid.
- The desktop's own top weights: libreoffice 1457 MiB, initrd 1369,
  linux-firmware 770, chromium 1391 (two builds — #121, left in), llvm-lib 540,
  bibata-cursors 322, mesa 264, mbrola-voices 259, nerd-fonts ~420 combined.
  Note what that list implies: no single lever gets a desktop ISO under ~4 GB —
  which is the case for (b) below.

**So the real decision is what a netinstall ISO IS**, and it should be settled
first (`[human]`): (a) the full try-before-install desktop minus the pin
(~6.3 GiB — barely lighter, probably not worth a second target); (b) a **TUI
installer only, no desktop** (~1 GiB, the actual "netinstall" in the Debian
sense) which drops "try before install" from that medium — the fat ISO still
offers it; (c) a middle desktop (no libreoffice/chromium — but note #103 just
put those there deliberately, and a *demo* desktop that can't browse is the
bug #103 fixed).

**The gotcha that decides feasibility:** without the pin, a netinstall target
fetches from `cache.nixos.org` for stock nixpkgs paths — but **Nomarchy's own
derivations are in no binary cache**, so they would build *from source on the
user's machine* during install. That is the same failure `tools/vm/gap-analysis.py`
exists to diagnose (and #113 is a live instance of). So this item probably
depends on a public binary cache (cachix) for the flake's own outputs, or it
trades an 8 GiB download for a 40-minute install. Establish that before
building the target.

Pass = a second, documented ISO target that is *substantially* smaller (state
the measured number, both ISOs built from one tree), installs successfully with
a network in a QEMU run, says clearly at boot that it needs one, and leaves the
offline ISO's behaviour untouched (`checks.*` for the offline path stay green).
- **NVIDIA first-class options** — **deferred past v1** (Bernardo
  2026-07-10). Keep #59 commented install guidance; no
  `nomarchy.hardware.nvidia.*` until a hybrid maintainer + queue.

_(#80–#83 + #85–#88 shipped 2026-07-11. Theme A day-2 + neon-glass finish
  shipped — VISION ✓. Dock/hibernate V3 → HARDWARE-QUEUE. Parallel
  fingerprint-or-password shipped 2026-07-12 (Bernardo promoted it live;
  `fingerprint.parallel`, pam-fprint-grosshack) — reader V3 →
  HARDWARE-QUEUE.)_

### v1.0 pointer

See **VISION**. Open PROPOSED: NVIDIA deferred past v1; IR portal (b)/(c)
need T14s (HARDWARE-QUEUE § T14s). Standing calls: browser = Chromium;
power = PPD. (Post-install hardware hints shipped 2026-07-17.)

## Decisions `[human]`

Open calls only Bernardo can make; agents add options/evidence but never
decide. **Resolved** entries stay for history; agents treat them as closed.

### Resolved (2026-07-17)

- **#143 rofi refilter highlight** — the 07-16 "wait for upstream" ruling
  was priced against carrying a patch; the maintainer's reply on
  rofi#2317 pointed at the `inputchange {}` config block instead. Adopted
  same day as pure config (`kb-row-first` on query edits, generated
  config.rasi) — no patch, no source build, watch closed
  (ROADMAP § Rofi highlight).
- **#120 netinstall** — stays deferred in PROPOSED (re-affirmed). When it
  is promoted, a public binary cache (cachix) is the likely first step.
- **#134 unstable packages** — build it: Nomarchy carries the
  `nixpkgs-unstable` input, `unstable.*` via the overlay, home-scope only.
  Shipped the same day (ROADMAP § `unstable.<pkg>` in the downstream).
- **#114 greeter layouts** — document only: a VT has one keymap by design,
  so tuigreet cannot honour per-device layouts. Shipped as the README
  "Greeter keyboard layout" note + a RECOVERY.md pointer; entry deleted.

### Resolved (2026-07-10)

- **Docs site vs Markdown-in-repo** — **markdown in-repo for now**
  (`docs/`, README). A rendered docs site is FUTURE if wanted.
- **Default browser** — **ship Chromium** in
  `templates/downstream/home.nix`; mime → `chromium-browser.desktop`.
  Opt out: delete the line / override mime.
- **Default power backend** — **keep PPD** (`nomarchy.system.power.backend`
  default). TLP remains the one-line opt-in. Rationale: stability + live
  profile API for menu/Waybar; Omarchy’s TLP experiment reverted.

### Resolved (2026-07-10, more)

- **Formatter adoption** — **yes, but not now.** Tracked as FUTURE
  (below). Nix-source style only (`nixfmt-rfc-style` or similar); one
  bulk reformat + CI/check when promoted. Until then: hand-aligned
  style per CONVENTIONS.

- **Hibernation** — **want by default** (product intent). Needs a
  disk-backed swap (file or partition) sized for resume; not zram alone.
  **Shipped as #76**; V3 power-cycle PASSED on TuringMachine 2026-07-12
  (ROADMAP § Hibernation + zram by default).

### Resolved (2026-07-10, #76 design)

- **Swap sizing** — **exactly RAM** (installer default, unchanged). Hibernate
  image ≤ RAM; zram takes day-to-day paging. **`swapSize=0`** stays no-swap.
- **Migration** — **docs runbook** (`docs/MIGRATION.md`), not a tool.
- **No-swap Hibernate** — keep the menu row; **notify on failure**.