A config file in a package no longer reports a missing node forever

The install-completeness sweep compares what a package's install record declares against what is actually in the mesh, and names anything missing. It is the instrument that catches a node lost after an install — the failure that once went eleven days unnamed and took a portal down with it.

Its value depends entirely on counting the right population. Deciding whether a shipped file becomes a node has two halves, and only one of them can be answered from a path. The first half — does any registered parser claim this extension — was unified across the two sides earlier: a .tsx view or a .png is not a node, and counting it produced a phantom ABSENT that re-fired on every pod boot forever.

The second half needs the bytes, and nothing was asking it. A file whose extension is claimed can still fail to become a node on its content: a well-formed .json carrying no $type, id or nodeType is not a node, which is exactly what every tsconfig.json, package.json and app.json looks like — and a package that ships a small front-end (a gui/rn/ folder, say) ships several. The installer parsed such a file, got nothing, and wrote nothing. The sweep, working from paths, counted {Package}/tsconfig as a node the install owed the mesh and reported it ABSENT, at Error, on every boot of every pod.

Nothing could clear it. The line's own advice — reinstalling it now repairs it — is false for this class: a reinstall meets the same bytes and fails the same way. So an unactionable finding sat at the same log site, in the same words, as the genuinely lost node the sweep exists to surface.

The fix is evidence rather than a longer list of exceptions. Only the installer holds the bytes, so the installer now records which declared files it could not read as nodes, and the sweep reads that instead of re-deriving a question it cannot ask. An exclusion list would have needed a new case for .tsx, then for package.json, then for whatever ships next — which is how this was reported twice.

Such a file is still a fault and is still reported: a package that declares a node it can never deliver gets its own line, at Error, saying what it actually is — a packaging defect, with the remedy that can work (move the file out of the package folder, or give it a shape the parser recognises). It simply stops being counted as an absence, and stops driving reinstalls that cannot help. A genuinely missing node still reads exactly as it did.

Three details that keep it honest. A record stamped before this existed records nothing, and that is kept distinct from "checked, and all of them parsed" — an unknown must never read as a clean result. An incremental update examines only the files it fetched, so the record merges rather than replaces, or the next boot would start re-reporting everything outside the delta. And the count travels on every verdict line, so the day a package does ship such a file it announces itself instead of arriving as an absence nobody can fix.

The full contract, including the merge rules and what the sweep still does not cover, is in Install Completeness.