Parent Call told rooms they had never been set up. Nothing about the
rooms was wrong. Read from the church broker: …/coordinator and
…/pending are retained and …/mode is absent, and the coordinator's own
source says why — it publishes the retained mode only in answer to an
operator writing to …/mode/set, and nobody ever has. Every classroom
waited a second and a half for a message that will never exist.
A missing mode is now read as the coordinator's own default rather than
as an unconfigured room: the room offers the call and lets the sanctuary
end answer, because that is the end that knows. A mode that really is
off still refuses, in the coordinator's words, and a broker that is
missing or unreachable still says which of those it is. Proved against a
rig broker made to match the church's exactly, with a call landing on
the sanctuary mock.
The card is anchored to the bottom-left corner instead of centred, by
layer shell, which is what the disc player's cover has used under KWin
for months. Anchoring rather than positioning is what makes it right at
1080p and at 4K without a coordinate anywhere. It falls back to the
centred card if the library is missing.
Notifications are sized for a room. Every Plasma measurement is a grid
unit and a grid unit is the height of the general font, so the font is
the lever — 15 point instead of Breeze's 10, which takes the card from
about 350x110 to about 410x145 at 100% and doubles again at 200%. Text,
icon, padding and buttons move together. The chime stays off. No shell
package: that path cost the panel and is not coming back.
And the product name is gone from everything a teacher sees. The
notification card is from Classroom, the disc player's from DVD.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Building the package showed what reading the tree did not: classroom-dvd
still calls classroom-window, classroom-mqtt still calls classroom-notify,
and the DVD overlay still imports the icon and stylesheet helpers the dock
shared. They go back in, and the write-up now counts what was actually
removed rather than what could be.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
The first piece of turning these machines into connected endpoints.
classroom-mqtt is one small service per room that subscribes, validates
what arrives, and hands the work to commands that already exist.
Nothing in the room depends on it. A broker that is down, a network that
is missing, a machine with no broker configured at all — each is a
service sitting quietly, not a classroom that fails. Nothing waits for
it at boot and the shipped default is off, so every existing classroom
upgrades into this release with messaging disabled until a broker
exists.
The room is the hostname, which is already how these machines are named.
Topics carry no product name because the broker is the church's and
these are just rooms: classroom/notify/all, classroom/notify/<room>, and
a retained classroom/status/<room> so anyone asking later can be told
which rooms are up without waiting for them to say so again.
Notifications are events and are never retained; status is state and is.
Stale messages cannot come back, which is the property that matters most
and has two halves. The session is clean, so a broker never hands over a
backlog from while the room was off. And retained notifications are
refused on arrival, because otherwise one would replay into every room
at every reboot forever. The honest limit is written down: MQTT only
flags a retained message when it is replayed to a new subscription, so a
retained publish delivered live is indistinguishable from an ordinary
one and is shown once — which is right, since it is live at that moment,
and the replay is the actual hazard.
Delivery reuses the session-aware sender rather than a second copy of
it. classroom-notify-test grew into the real thing, so it is now
classroom-notify with the sample sender a wrapper over it, and its 36
tests came along.
The broker password lives in device.conf, so that file stops being world
readable: 0640 root:classroom, which everything that reads it already
satisfies.
Transport logic is kept free of any broker library so it can be tested
without one — 40 checks on room identity, the topic contract and which
payloads become notifications. Separately verified against a real
mosquitto: connect, subscribe, retained status, per-room and all-room
delivery, urgency, duplicate and expired and malformed messages ignored,
the broker killed with the daemon surviving, reconnect, and a stale
retained notification left on the broker not reaching the screen when a
room boots.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>