didericis
9d82535390
Adds scripts/linux-install-test.sh, a throwaway-VM harness that exercises install.sh the way a brand-new user would across a Linux distro matrix (Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, Alpine, NixOS), plus the research note docs/research/testing-clean-install-on-linux.md that motivates the approach. This is the Linux counterpart to the macOS clean-install harness. On Linux the boundary of choice flips from a throwaway user account to a disposable KVM VM: it's a genuine kernel + userland + package-manager boundary that wipes to nothing on teardown, and a single harness can swap distro cloud images to cover the several package-management regimes Linux fragments into. The host already needs KVM for the Firecracker backend, so a per-run, copy-on-write VM (qemu-img create -b base) is cheap here -- the equivalent of `docker run --rm`, for a whole machine. Per run the harness caches one read-only base image, boots a throwaway overlay via QEMU/KVM with user-mode networking (no root, no bridge), injects an ephemeral SSH key + passwordless login through a cloud-init seed ISO, installs the distro's prerequisites (python3 + git + pipx), pipes THIS checkout's install.sh into the guest exactly as `curl ... | sh` would, and asserts the CLI installed cleanly. The overlay is deleted on teardown, so even the OS-level prerequisites are wiped -- unlike a throwaway user, the reset is total. Subcommands mirror the macOS harness (up/run/status/down/test) plus test-all (the matrix) and ssh (an interactive guest shell). test arms an EXIT/INT/TERM trap the moment the VM exists, so a failure or Ctrl-C still tears it down. Scope is installer correctness, not runtime: there is no nested KVM/Docker in the VM, so `bot-bottle doctor` correctly reports every backend not-ready and exits non-zero by design. The pass criterion is therefore install.sh exiting 0, the bot-bottle entry point being present on the fresh user's PATH, and `bot-bottle --version` running -- not a green doctor. doctor's output is still printed so a real installer regression (broken shim, import error) stays visible. Validated with `bash -n` and `shellcheck`. Runtime is host-only (needs /dev/kvm, qemu, cloud-localds), so like the macOS harness it isn't exercised by the Linux PR CI. The cloud-image URLs in the DISTRO table are the one place to bump when a distro cuts a newer build. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Docs
How this project records what it builds and why — and a guide to picking the right document for what you're capturing.
When to write which document
| Artifact | For |
|---|---|
Design workflow (docs/design-workflow.md) |
How discussion becomes canonical design, how dependencies are recorded, and when implementation may begin. |
Glossary (docs/glossary.md) |
Canonical term definitions — what words mean in this project. |
PRD (docs/prds/) |
A feature: what to build, scope, success criteria. |
Research note (docs/research/) |
A landscape/tradeoff investigation. |
Decision record (docs/decisions/) |
A decision that isn't itself a feature — a policy, a convention, a "we will / won't do this," or a load-bearing choice made inside a larger PRD that deserves to be discoverable on its own. |
A decision that's fully specified by a PRD doesn't need duplicating in a decision record. Write one when the decision would otherwise be buried in prose, lost in an issue thread, or have no in-repo home at all (small requests that don't merit a PRD; non-feature choices like merge strategy or a trust posture).