Observed once during control-mode QA (ADR-0012), not reproducible — filing to monitor, not to fix blindly.
Symptom (single occurrence)
After a burst of dev-host reloads, the whole window concluded tmux was unavailable (deck.tmuxAvailable false → + row hidden) until the next reload, despite tmux being installed and on PATH.
Suspected cause (unconfirmed)
tmuxPreflight spawns tmux -V; a flaky spawn (possibly EAGAIN under a reload storm fork-bomb) may have made preflight report unavailable. This is speculation — could equally be a quirk of the Extension Development Host reload cycle rather than a real product issue. We could not reproduce it.
Why not fix now
Per the empirical principle: do not fix what we cannot reproduce. A retry-on-spawn-error in tmuxPreflight would be the obvious hardening, but adding it blind risks masking a real availability signal.
Action
Monitor. If it recurs, capture: the tmux -V spawn error (errno), reload cadence, and whether a plain reload clears it. With a real repro, add a bounded retry on transient spawn errors (EAGAIN/ENOMEM) only.
Observed once during control-mode QA (ADR-0012), not reproducible — filing to monitor, not to fix blindly.
Symptom (single occurrence)
After a burst of dev-host reloads, the whole window concluded tmux was unavailable (
deck.tmuxAvailablefalse →+row hidden) until the next reload, despite tmux being installed and on PATH.Suspected cause (unconfirmed)
tmuxPreflightspawnstmux -V; a flaky spawn (possiblyEAGAINunder a reload storm fork-bomb) may have made preflight report unavailable. This is speculation — could equally be a quirk of the Extension Development Host reload cycle rather than a real product issue. We could not reproduce it.Why not fix now
Per the empirical principle: do not fix what we cannot reproduce. A retry-on-spawn-error in
tmuxPreflightwould be the obvious hardening, but adding it blind risks masking a real availability signal.Action
Monitor. If it recurs, capture: the
tmux -Vspawn error (errno), reload cadence, and whether a plain reload clears it. With a real repro, add a bounded retry on transient spawn errors (EAGAIN/ENOMEM) only.