bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5
9f3e0b8cd3
The client compares names while Android installs by versionCode, and the wire had no way to close that gap: the sidecar was one positional line and the endpoint returned a name only. This is the plumbing that makes the ordering key decidable by the client at all. The sidecar is now JSON rather than a grown positional string. That shape was chosen against a specific failure: the obvious growth path was "<name> <code>", which a first-space split silently mangles the moment a third field appears — the code stops parsing as an integer and the reader falls back to name comparison WITHOUT erroring. JSON cannot mistake a new field for an old one. code is a POINTER on both sides, and omitempty on the wire. Absent has to stay distinguishable from zero: a build published before ordering keys were recorded genuinely has no code, and zero would claim it is infinitely old rather than unknown. A malformed sidecar now fails loudly instead of serving a blank version. If an unreadable file produced an empty name, every client would compare against nothing, conclude it was current, and go quiet — "I cannot read this" and "there is nothing newer" would return the same answer, which is the failure mode nobody reports because nobody is offered anything to report. The non-tag :latest path no longer RECONSTRUCTS the bundled APK's version. android-release now publishes the sidecar as a release asset beside the APK, and the image build downloads it. The old reconstruction duplicated a derivation formula across two files, and could only ever recover the name — the ordering key is build-time minutes and exists nowhere once that build ends. Releases predating the sidecar report their name with a null code, which is the honest answer rather than a guessed one. image-release also drops to a shallow checkout: it needed full history and tags only to re-derive versions from the tagged commit, and now touches git for nothing. MINSTREL_VERSION comes from GITHUB_REF. Two things checked rather than assumed. The Android Json sets ignoreUnknownKeys, so the added fields cannot break already-installed apps. It also sets coerceInputValues, which will silently turn a null code into 0 if step 4 declares the field non-nullable — recorded on task #3811, because reading the field declaration alone would never reveal it. Also fixes a stale comment block describing "the Flutter client", deleted in v2026.08.18. Step 3 of 5 — Scribe task #3810, milestone #390. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01SQ31KQpYbStyK5y58UmPLH