The registry used to be built once, inline in build_bot, so every change to
the data behind it -- a person tagged in the web UI, an alias, soon a command
switched off from the management page -- meant restarting the unit. That is
cheap and lossless, but it is a deploy step somebody has to remember, and a
21:37 report can land in the middle of it.
Now the registration sequence lives in wiring.build_registry, and
RegistryHolder runs it again on POST /_reload: the new table is built whole
and swapped in with one assignment, never patched in place, so a duplicate
trigger is found before anything the dispatcher reads has changed. Bad data
(ConfigError, DuplicateTriggerError) keeps the previous table and answers
409 with the reason; a programming error still surfaces as a 500.
scripts/reload.sh wraps it, with --code for the restart a Python change
needs, and an optional command to type in testbot so "reloaded" means
"answered". No Python hot-reload on purpose.
The loader change is what makes deploying this safe: two rows in the live
tags.json name files that are no longer in media/, and load_pack refused
them, so the next restart would have looped on ConfigError. A stale tag is
drift in a file a page edits mid-session, not a broken album -- it is now
skipped with a warning naming it. A tag that reaches outside the album is
still refused. pack_load.py split at the 250-line cap; pack_tags.py is the
half whose checks are not all fatal.
Proven offline in scripts/e2e.sh: !delta is unknown, a fifth person is
tagged into the synthetic pack, scripts/reload.sh runs, and the same
process posts delta's photo.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
