The claude and codex CLIs spawn shells to do their work, and killing only
the direct child left those shells holding the pipes: the stdout loop
never saw EOF, so the run hung forever with the watchdog already fired,
and cleanup's subprocess.run could hang inside the stdlib the same way
after its own timeout. Both now run the CLI with its output in files
rather than pipes and put the whole tree down on a timeout, taskkill /T
on Windows and a process group everywhere else. Whether a dead resume
means "start a fresh conversation" was decided by English substrings of
stderr, which a localized CLI never says; a resumed run that exits
nonzero with no answer now retries fresh once, whatever the words were.
Recognised API trouble is the exception: a spent quota, a signed-out CLI
or a dead network is not the session's fault, and is reported as itself
rather than retried into a second copy of the same failure.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <[email protected]>
history.jsonl and meetings.jsonl were rewritten read-modify-replace from
two threads with nothing between them, so a dictation landing during a
trim, or a meeting status landing during a delete, was silently gone; one
lock now wraps every touch of either file. The config rename gets a flush
and fsync in front of it, because a rename that survives a power loss
ahead of its data is an empty settings file, and a corrupt file is set
aside as config.json.broken instead of being quietly replaced by defaults
on the next save, API keys and all. Every replace retries briefly on
Windows, where an antivirus or a sync tool holds a fresh file for a beat
and one PermissionError out of a Qt slot takes the whole application
down.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <[email protected]>
install_program deleted the working install before the download had even
started, so a network failure, or the running server's own locked DLLs,
left "whisper.cpp is not installed" behind on a machine where it had
been. The order is now: download, unpack beside, stop the server whose
binary lives there, swap, so the outage is the swap and not the whole
transfer, and a download that fails never takes the server down at all.
A re-downloaded model the server still holds open no longer costs the
finished download; the .part survives and the message says who is holding
the file.
sweep() forgot the pid file before verifying or killing, so one transient
error orphaned a loaded model forever; it verifies, kills, then forgets,
and a verification that could not run leaves the file for the next start.
On Windows the ownership check was the executable's basename, which a
recycled pid could satisfy with somebody else's server; it is the full
image path now, read into a buffer that grows past 260 characters.
stop() takes the launch lock, so stopping during a start kills the server
the start was making rather than missing it, and _forget only removes a
record that is still its own. The relaunch retry stopped reading English
out of the log tail: the retryable failure is a child that exited without
ever listening, and that is what is tested, along with the child still
being alive once its port answers.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <[email protected]>
Four holes in one class, found by a review the last one paid for. The
capture's stderr went to a pipe nobody drained, so a chatty ffmpeg could
fill it and freeze the recording; it goes to a file now, the way the
meeting recorder always did. A capture dying with audio already buffered
ended the pump in silence, the clock counting over a dead microphone;
there is a died signal now, and the application transcribes what was
caught. A pump that outlived its two-second join could write stale audio
into the next recording and kill the next recording's process; each run
now owns its objects and a token. Short pipe reads were each billed a
whole chunk in the silence math, overstating speech; the pump reads exact
chunks, as meetings do.
Smaller ones alongside: write_wav failing no longer strands the state
machine; a deliberate stop no longer reports ffmpeg's interrupt code as
"Nothing was recorded: ffmpeg -> 255"; kills are reaped so no message
says "exit code None"; the pw-record probe is paid once per process; the
RMS loop uses sumprod where Python has it; the pactl and pw-record
listings decode as the UTF-8 they are. paths gains the NO_WINDOW constant
this module re-exports, the one spelling every subprocess site after it
shares.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <[email protected]>
listen() was the whole of the single-instance check and it cannot be one:
a Windows named pipe takes a second server on the same name rather than
refusing it, and everywhere else removeServer() first takes the live socket
away from the instance holding it. Starting Dikte over a running Dikte then
left two whole copies up, two tray icons and all, and the newer one's
sweep() killed the whisper the older one was answering dictations with. On
a machine that sleeps instead of logging out, that is one Start Menu click
away, and it cost a real dictation before it was understood.
A QLockFile in the data directory closes the race on all three systems,
taken before the QApplication is even built, and behind it the probe is the
side-effect-free status verb: the Settings window opens as the sign of life
only when a bare second start deliberately asks for it, not as a byproduct
of a probe racing a forwarded toggle. The two Windows relaunch dances
collapse into one ipc.respawn.
The checkout installer and the packaged setup each kept an autostart the
other could not see, so a machine that tried both started two copies at
every sign-in: each autostart now removes the other's entry, the silent
every-start repair backs off from a Run value whose target still exists,
and each uninstaller deletes the shared dikte.cmd only when the shim
names its own install.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <[email protected]>
The dshow parser pinned the bracketed prefix to the `[dshow @ ...]` the
older builds print, and ffmpeg 8 writes `[in#0 @ ...]` there instead: on a
current install every line fell through the anchors, the device list came
back empty, and a dictation with no microphone picked could not start at
all. The prefix is now any bracketed tag, which the anchors and the quoted
name still keep apart from the error lines. Pinned with a listing taken
verbatim from ffmpeg 8.1.2 on Windows 11, third kind marker `(none)`
included.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <[email protected]>
A backslash only separates on Windows, and this test also runs on the
Linux that checks the Windows half.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <[email protected]>
Windows joins the three systems as its own entry in each table: DirectShow
through ffmpeg for capture, the Win32 clipboard and SendInput for the paste,
RegisterHotKey for the global shortcut, and the whisper.cpp and llama.cpp
Windows zips (the OpenBLAS whisper build, which transcribes about twice as
fast on a plain CPU). Settings go to APPDATA, data to LOCALAPPDATA, and
install.ps1 adds the Start Menu entry, the dikte command and an optional
autostart. Meetings are not supported yet: Windows offers nothing to record
the far side from.
Porting surfaced three fixes that were not Windows specific:
- A stopped or overlong download tried to delete its .part file while still
holding it open, which Windows refuses. The unlinks now wait for the handle.
- The CLI transcribed files without handing the local servers their settings
first, so a local provider failed with "no model downloaded" wherever the
GUI had not run in the same process.
- The audio content types are pinned instead of asked of the registry, which
answers differently machine to machine.
One fix is Windows specific but sits in shared code: shutdown() does not end
a blocked recv there, so stopping a request also closes the socket handle.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <[email protected]>
