jaap-jan
b7325b78ca
Development and testing are Windows-only, so anything unverified elsewhere needs to be written down or it gets assumed to work. Several of these have already cost time once: PostgreSQL 18 moving its data directory silently gives a carried-over compose file an empty volume, and a loopback-bound Tomcat beat Docker's 0.0.0.0 publish for `localhost`, making every Keycloak realm 404 while the container looked healthy. The largest entry is the Avalonia WebView on Linux, which remains the biggest risk in the plan and is why the terminal sits behind ITerminalHost. Also records two things this milestone deliberately left undone -- no rate limiting on the enrollment and sync write paths until M2, and /me not touching last_seen_at_utc -- so neither reads later as an oversight.
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Platform flags
Things known or suspected to behave differently outside Windows, plus deployment gotchas that have already cost time once. Development and testing are currently Windows-only, so anything here marked unverified has not run on the platform in question and must not be assumed to work.
Each entry says what the risk is, why it matters, and what to do about it. Delete an entry when it has been verified or made moot — not when it merely stops being convenient.
Cryptography
ChaCha20Poly1305.IsSupported is false on macOS, and on Windows builds before 10.0.20142.
This is why the client uses NSec (libsodium) rather than the BCL for content encryption; see
docs/crypto.md §1. Already mitigated — but if a BCL AEAD path is ever added as a fallback it
must gate on IsSupported rather than assuming availability, or the client will fail to open
any vault on macOS.
Argon2id timings are measured on one Windows machine only. 256 MiB with t=4 took 323 ms here.
The floor and ceiling in EnrollmentLimits were chosen against that number. Unverified
elsewhere: recalibrate on the slowest target platform before recommending a default profile,
because a cost that is comfortable on a desktop can make unlock unusable on a low-power laptop —
and the parameters are stored per user at enrollment, so a bad default is a per-user migration.
libsodium ships native binaries per RID. This complicates single-file and AOT publishing, and
on macOS every native library (libsodium, libSkiaSharp, libHarfBuzzSharp, libe_sqlite3)
must be signed individually with --options runtime --timestamp before the bundle is signed,
or notarization fails with an error that does not name the offending file.
Desktop client
The Avalonia WebView on Linux is unproven, and is the single largest risk in the plan. The
official control uses WPE WebKit (libwpewebkit-2.0); the community NativeWebView uses WebKitGTK
(libwebkit2gtk-4.1), which is far more widely installed. Avalonia's own documentation
contradicts itself on whether offscreen rendering works there. Unverified: the spike must cover
Ubuntu on both Wayland and X11, Fedora KDE, and macOS 15. This is why the terminal sits behind
ITerminalHost — that abstraction is what preserves the option to swap backends, and it should
not be collapsed away for convenience.
SSH.NET's window-change on ShellStream is unverified. A terminal that cannot resize is
unusable, so this gates M1's client work. Fall back to IChannelSession if it does not work, and
prefer forking and upstreaming a fix over reflection as a long-term answer.
MSIX packaging is ruled out, not merely deprioritised. A packaged app runs WebView2 in an
AppContainer where loopback connections are blocked without a CheckNetIsolation exemption. The
terminal data plane is a loopback WebSocket, so MSIX would break the product outright. Velopack
for Windows/macOS/AppImage; Flatpak and deb/rpm defer updates to the package manager.
Linux ships AppImage and Flatpak first, specifically so the WebKit runtime is bundled rather than assumed present on the user's machine.
Build and CI
Integration tests need a Docker daemon (Testcontainers). They run on ubuntu-latest in CI.
macOS runners have no Docker daemon, and the Windows CI job is deliberately build-only. So
anything proved by an integration test is proved on Linux only — which is the right place for
server code, and no coverage at all for client platform behaviour.
[CallerFilePath] is rewritten to /_/... under ContinuousIntegrationBuild. Any test that
locates a fixture by source path passes locally and fails in CI. Copy fixtures to the output
directory and read them via AppContext.BaseDirectory instead; GoldenVectorTests shows the
pattern.
dotnet format --verify-no-changes is part of the CI gate and exits non-zero on style
warnings, not just whitespace. Run it before pushing; a build with zero warnings can still fail
that step.
Deployment
PostgreSQL 18 moved its data directory to /var/lib/postgresql, not /var/lib/postgresql/data
as in 17 and earlier. A compose file carried over from an older version silently gets an empty
volume — the database appears to work and loses everything on restart. Relevant to any compose
file other than deploy/docker-compose.dev.yml, which is already correct.
Keycloak in the dev stack listens on host port 18080, not 8080. On this machine an unrelated
Apache Tomcat holds 127.0.0.1:8080, and a loopback-specific bind wins over Docker's 0.0.0.0
publish when resolving localhost — so every realm request returned 404 while the container
looked healthy. If discovery fails against a locally-published container, check for another
process bound specifically to loopback before suspecting the container.
Sync:CursorSigningKey generates an ephemeral per-process key when unset. Fine for a single
node; on a multi-node deployment cursors issued by one node are rejected by another, so clients
resync from the beginning repeatedly. Must be configured explicitly before running more than one
instance. WarnOnRiskyConfiguration logs this at startup.
Rate limiting is not implemented yet (M2). POST /api/v1/me/enrollment and the sync endpoints
are reachable by any authenticated caller at any rate. Enrollment requires a valid access token
and is idempotent, so the exposure is resource consumption rather than a credential-guessing
surface — but it is still an unmetered write path.
/api/v1/me does not update last_seen_at_utc. Deliberate: a GET that writes on every call is
a smell, and nothing depends on the value yet. Revisit when device management lands, since that is
the first feature that needs it.