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; design history in docs/ROADMAP.md; map in docs/README.md and agent/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.

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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.)

127. [blocked:hw] Docked idle: black screens, no wake, undock does not restore panel

Bernardo 2026-07-15 (AMD dev box, docked): left the laptop docked; after a few minutes of idle it appeared to "sleep". Then:

1. External keyboard/mouse did not wake any display.
2. Unplugging the external monitor did not turn the laptop panel back on (dock mode has eDP disabled — undock should re-enable it).
3. The machine was still alive: Caps Lock LED toggled on the keyboard.

This also killed a long agent session (looked like a "crash" from the outside). Separate from awake undock recovery (HARDWARE-QUEUE round 8): the failure is idle while docked, then no path back to a usable panel.

Likely shape (code-side, unconfirmed on the incident): on AC, hypridle does not call systemctl suspend (onAc || suspend — only battery suspends at 15 min). Idle path is lock @5 min + dpms off @10 min (modules/home/idle.nix). Caps Lock working fits DPMS/lock blackout better than deep S3. Dock mode has already disabled eDP; recovery then needs either (a) input → hypridle on-resume / dpms on on the external, or (b) undock → nomarchy-display-transition undock re-enabling the panel. Both failed. after_sleep_cmd only does hyprctl dispatch dpms on and never re-enables a disabled internal.

Progress 2026-07-15:

• Recovery tooling: undock ends with dpms on; nomarchy-display-wake / nomarchy-display-dump (SUPER+SHIFT+D; TTY if it works).
• Mitigation (shipped): do not DPMS-off when clamshell — if any laptop internal (eDP/LVDS/DSI) exists in monitors all but is not enabled, the 10 min listener skips blanking. Lock at 5 min still runs; undocked laptops still DPMS-off as before. Bernardo: Ctrl+Alt+F3 did not yield a usable TTY on the original brick, so prevention > dump path.
• Scope settled (#136, 2026-07-16): the gate is clamshell, not "docked" — and Bernardo confirms the incident was exactly that, laptop closed. So the code matched the evidence and only the wording overclaimed; that is fixed (idle.nix, ROADMAP, and the journal line, now dpms-off skipped: clamshell). Docked with the lid open still blanks and is untested — not exempted, not claimed safe.
• Revisit later (LATER): intentional DPMS-when-clamshell once wake is proven trustworthy (monitor power-save without a brick). Tracked as #135 (state key + the surface to delete this by), downstream of the hardware test below.
• Caveat the test must settle: the mitigation is a cure for an unconfirmed cause. "Blanking the only live output caused the brick" is inference from one incident, shipped at V1. If DPMS-off is not the trigger, we are paying a permanent behaviour cost (docked externals never sleep) and the brick is still live — so confirming the cause outranks #135/#136.
• Symptom 2 is SOLVED, and it was not DPMS (ff5017e, 2026-07-16). Bernardo reproduced "unplugging did not turn the laptop panel back on" live, minutes after TEST A — with no blanking involved at all (the mitigation had kept the external lit). Cause: awaiting_lid_open is set by every successful undock and cleared only when the external is gone and the lid is open, so a clamshell undock latches it; a re-dock clears its sibling undock_pending but not the latch, and the next departure is then silently dropped by the [ -z "$awaiting_lid_open" ] guard. His journal shows the first undock logging nothing, a release the instant he lifted the lid, then a clean undock. Replaying the sequence with the lid never opened: 1 of 3 undocks ran; fixed, 3 of 3. What this does to the theory: the original brick may simply have been an ordinary blank plus a recovery that could not run — two mundane bugs, not one exotic DRM state. TEST B is now the only thing standing between that hypothesis and the truth, and it is a much safer test with the latch fixed (an undock is a real escape hatch again).

Pass (current mitigation): clamshell-docked on AC, idle past 10+ min → external stays lit under hyprlock (journal: dpms-off skipped: clamshell); undocked still blanks at 10 min and wakes on input. Full original pass (wake after DPMS-while-clamshell) deferred to the LATER revisit.

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The two tests, exactly (2026-07-16)

There is no SSH lifeline on this box (sshd inactive), which is why test B self-recovers instead of relying on one. If you would rather have the net, turn services.openssh.enable = true on for the day and keep a phone SSH client open — then a brick is a nuisance, not a reboot.

Test A — does the mitigation hold? (safe, ~15 min, unattended)

1. Docked, lid closed, on AC. Leave it completely alone for 12 minutes.
2. Expect: at 5 min the external shows hyprlock; at 10 min it stays lit.
3. Then: journalctl --user -b -t nomarchy-idle --since '-15 min' → one dpms-off skipped: clamshell (internal eDP-1 present but off).
4. Now open the lid / undock, idle 11 min → the panel should blank, and wake on a keypress. That half must still work; the mitigation is not supposed to have disabled blanking everywhere.

Test B — was DPMS-off actually the trigger? (the decisive one; bounded) This is the test that outranks everything else here, because the mitigation is a cure for an inferred cause. Docked, lid closed, from a terminal on the external:

( sleep 45
  hyprctl dispatch dpms on
  hyprctl reload            # re-enables every output (the #142 hammer)
) >/tmp/dpms-test.log 2>&1 &
hyprctl dispatch dpms off

The screen goes black. Then, in order:

1. Press keys / move the mouse in the first ~40s. Does it come back? (In the incident it did not — this is the exact step that failed.)
2. Wait for the 45s auto-recovery. Does the external return by itself?
3. If it is still dark, open the lid — the reload should have re-enabled eDP even if the external stayed dead.
4. Afterwards: journalctl --user -b -t nomarchy-idle -t nomarchy-display-watch --since '-5 min'

What each outcome means — all three are useful:

• Input wakes it → DPMS-off is not the trigger. The mitigation is a permanent behaviour cost buying nothing, the brick is still live and un-diagnosed → revert the skip, #135 never exists, and hunt the real cause (hyprlock? hypridle's own resume path? the dock's DP link?).
• Dark until the 45s recovery, then fine → the compositor was alive and dpms on works, so blanking-while-clamshell is the trigger and the mitigation is right → #135 becomes the way to opt back in.
• Dark even after recovery (lid needed) → the original brick, reproduced deterministically and on demand. That is the best outcome: it turns a once-off incident into something bisectable (try it without hyprlock, with the lid open, on the internal only …).

Note the deliberate omission: this runs dpms off by hand rather than waiting for hypridle, precisely because the shipped mitigation would otherwise skip it. Same command, same state, no rebuild.

Fallback if the cause resists (Bernardo 2026-07-16): diagnosing stays the preference — DPMS when docked is the outcome we want. But the mitigation as shipped holds a near-static lock screen on the externals indefinitely, so if the cause cannot be pinned down, a screensaver while docked is the consolation prize: it protects the panels (burn-in — the same cost #135 names) without re-entering the blanking path that bricked the session. Not a new item: it is the "if diagnosis fails" branch of this one, and #135's state key is where it would land.

NEXT

135. Give the #127 DPMS mitigation a state key (and a way back)

The shipped mitigation is hardcoded policy: docked (clamshell) externals now never blank, and hyprlock has no timeout of its own, so they stay lit indefinitely. Two real costs land on the user — a couple of 27" panels at ~60–100W all night, and OLED burn-in from a near-static lock screen held for hours. Today there is no way to opt back in, which also breaks the in-flake-state rule that settings are menu-writable.

Add settings.idle.dpmsWhenDocked (default false = today's safe behaviour), read by modules/home/idle.nix's dpmsOff gate, with a Preferences row. The real point is not the option: it gives the mitigation a named surface to delete once wake is proven, instead of an unowned LATER note that quietly becomes the product. Whoever removes the mitigation removes the key in the same commit.

Order: after the #127 hardware test. If DPMS-off turns out not to be the trigger, the mitigation is reverted wholesale and this key never exists — building it first risks shipping an option for a policy we withdraw.

143. Rofi keeps the selected row number when the search changes, so the highlight lands on an unrelated entry

Bernardo 2026-07-16, and his repro is exact: open the app menu, type ca, move the selection two items right (onto ChatGPT), press backspace once (query is now c). The list re-expands — first entry is now Slack — but the highlight stays on the third row, which is now GHex, an app that has nothing to do with what he typed. Enter at that moment launches the wrong thing.

Cause — upstream rofi (2.0.0, source/widgets/listview.c), not our config. A filter change ends in listview_set_num_elements(), which does not reset the selection; it re-asserts the old one:

lv->req_elements = rows;
listview_set_selected(lv, lv->selected);   /* the *previous* index */

and listview_set_selected() only clamps it to the new bounds:

lv->selected = MIN(selected, lv->req_elements - 1);

So what is preserved is the row number, not the entry — nothing checks that row 2 still holds the thing that was selected, or that it matches the query at all. Typing more hides this (the list shrinks, the clamp usually drags the highlight along); backspacing exposes it, because the list grows back underneath a stationary index. There is no option for it: -dump-config has nothing about selection-on-refilter, and auto-select is a different feature (it fires only when exactly one row survives).

One correction to the report: it is not the app menu. listview is the widget behind every rofi surface we ship, so our text menus (Recovery, System, Preferences…) do the same. It is merely far more visible in drun, where the list is long and — because we set sort = true — reorders on every keystroke, so a stationary index points somewhere new each time. In a short text menu you would probably see it and correct without noticing why.

Reported upstream 2026-07-16: https://github.com/davatorium/rofi/issues/2317 (open, filed as bemagri, with the 2.0.0 line numbers and the observation that rofi_view_set_selected_line already maps a stable id through line_map — so the fix reuses an existing primitive rather than inventing one). No patch was sent: the scoping call is the maintainer's, since keeping the index across a reload looks deliberate (#1064 asked for exactly that, and got it in 1.7.4). No duplicate found before filing.

Decided 2026-07-16 (Bernardo): wait for upstream. Do not carry a patch. The overlay option was real but priced badly — our derivations are in no binary cache, so a patched rofi means every machine compiles rofi from source, on every lock bump, to fix a highlight. That is a permanent, distro-wide install cost for an annoyance with a free workaround (glance before you press Enter). This item is now a watch, not work: the only thing to do is check rofi#2317, and take the fix when a release carries it. If it is still open at the next lock bump, that is fine — nothing here rots meanwhile.

LATER

• DPMS when docked (revisit #127): today we skip display blanking while any laptop internal is present-but-disabled (dock/clamshell), so idle only locks. That avoids blanking the sole external and the brick where wake/TTY failed (2026-07-15). Revisit when we want monitor power-save on dock again: re-enable DPMS-off for that mode only if nomarchy-display-wake (or better) reliably restores the external and undock-while-black restores eDP on the AMD dock setup — without depending on SSH. Until then, leave the skip in modules/home/idle.nix.
• Wallpapers artifact split (ROADMAP § Faster switches — decided, deferred): pinned Nomarchy-wallpapers input so a state write stops re-copying 86 MB. Follow-on: pre-built theme variants if switches are still slow after.
• 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

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).

134. unstable.<pkg> in the downstream — a newer app without a second flake

Bernardo 2026-07-15, wanting a newer LM Studio (pinned 0.4.15-2 vs unstable 0.4.19-2) and disliking the only path that works today. There is no seam: mkFlake takes src/username/hardwareProfile/system only, and homeConfigurations is built from mkFlake's own pkgs (inherit pkgs), so a nixpkgs.overlays in system.nix cannot reach a home package. The user is left hand-pinning a fetchTarball rev+sha256 in home.nix (verified working) — a second pin with no lock, which is exactly the Nix expertise the distro exists to spare them. Sketch: home.packages = [ unstable.lmstudio ];, and maybe stable. as an explicit synonym for today's bare pkgs.

The shape that keeps the promises: Nomarchy carries the nixpkgs-unstable input itself and exposes it through overlays.default as an unstable attrset, so downstream stays one input, stays locked, and nomarchy-pull still moves it. Cost/questions to settle before building:

• Lock churn: every lock bump now moves two channels, and the full-checklist rule (VERIFICATION §5) applies to both.
• Duplication: measured — pinned vs unstable lmstudio build closures share only 690 of ~3.7–4k paths (separate stdenv bootstrap). Opt-in per package, but a user who reaches for it pays a second glibc/stack in the closure.
• "Tested together upstream" weakens by construction: nothing validates pinned-Nomarchy + unstable-app. Needs an explicit, documented "you own this combination" line, not silence.
• Does unstable belong in the eval by default, or only when referenced? (An unused input still locks + fetches.)
• Scope: home packages only, or system.nix too?

Alternative if that is too much surface: give mkFlake an overlays ? [] param (one-line seam, user still owns their own input/pin — cheaper for us, still expert-only for them). Related: #133.

114. Greeter ignores per-device keyboard layouts

Found by Bernardo 2026-07-14: logging out while docked lands on tuigreet, where his external keyboard (remembered as us via settings.keyboard.devices) types the session layout gb — so the password prompt fights him. Not a regression and not docking-related: per-device layouts are applied with hyprctl keyword device[<name>]:kb_layout, which only exists inside a running Hyprland session, while tuigreet draws on a kernel VT whose single keymap comes from console.useXkbConfig ← services.xserver.xkb.layout. A VT structurally cannot do per-device layouts, so this is a design gap, not a bug to patch. Options, cheapest first: (a) document it and stop there; (b) a greeter layout-cycle key (tuigreet has no such feature — would need the keymap swapped under it); (c) host tuigreet inside a small Wayland compositor (cage/labwc), which does get per-device XKB and would let the greeter honour the same in-flake state the session uses — real work, and it changes the greeter's whole rendering path (modules/nixos/greeter.nix themes tuigreet through the 16 ANSI console slots, so (c) is not a drop-in). Worth deciding whether the greeter is meant to be layout-aware at all before costing it.

• 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.

• Post-install hardware hints (VISION § B) — After the general “you're set” card (#81), optionally fire one additional self-gated notify when the machine actually has the hardware: (a) fwupdmgr on PATH → “System › Firmware to check LVFS updates”; (b) fprintd-list on PATH → “System › Fingerprint to enroll”. One-shot markers in settings.* (same in-checkout discipline as firstBootShown); never a permanent MOTD nag. Cost: small — extend nomarchy-first-boot or a sibling oneshot + checks.first-boot fixture. Control-center / MOTD already mention these; the gap is the silent first graphical session for people who never open those.

(#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: post-install hardware hints; NVIDIA deferred past v1; IR portal (b)/(c) need T14s (HARDWARE-QUEUE § T14s). Standing calls: browser = Chromium; power = PPD.

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 (2026-07-10)

• 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.