The installer inferred that question from whatever the server happened to look
like: a MySQL service exists, the database has tables, the site exists, the venv
exists. None of those record who created them. A retry after a failed first
install was therefore taken for an upgrade of somebody else's working system,
which produced two dead ends on exactly the retry the wizard invites: stage 3
demanded a mandatory backup of a database its own failed attempt had written,
and then refused to prune tables it had created minutes earlier, because core
migration 7d05 seeds access protocols owned by the computers plugin and any
profile without that plugin hit the refusal every single time.
An install record at ProgramData\ShopDB-Flask\install-state.json answers it
instead. It is written when provisioning STARTS rather than when it finishes,
because the run that dies halfway is precisely the run whose retry needs it, and
it records what this installer created as it goes, so a crashed run no longer
leaves the next one guessing from the machine.
During unfinished first provisioning the pre-migration backup becomes advisory
and prune may force, since every row present was written by an earlier attempt
of the same install. On an established install both stay exactly as they were.
The classification is deliberately asymmetric: an install predating this record
carries a version stamp and probably real data, so it is treated as established
and keeps the mandatory backup. Guessing "first run" there would arm
prune --force against live tables.
Get-CreatedItems comma-protects its return. A zero-length array returned from a
PowerShell function unrolls to $null, and $null.Count is fatal under StrictMode
2.0 - the same fault that made bundle verification fail on every install
earlier. The harness caught it before it shipped.
Tests: deploy/windows/installer/tests/test-install-state.ps1 exercises new
servers, retries, completed installs, unrecorded-but-stamped installs, records
naming another directory, corrupt records, and persistence across a crash.
tests/test_installer_state.py runs it wherever pwsh exists and asserts the
invariants as text everywhere else. Both were confirmed to fail when the prune
gate or the comma protection is removed.
pytest.ini stops collection walking into deploy/windows/installer/bundle, which
is build output holding a complete second copy of the application. Importing
every plugin twice made SQLAlchemy refuse a redefined table and the whole suite
fail to collect, on a tree with nothing wrong in it, purely because an installer
had been built first. It surfaced only when the bundle grew from four plugins to
thirteen.
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