publish_router_mode registered its self-echo correlation marker before
publishing but removed it in a finally block the instant the QoS 1 publish()
call observed its PUBACK. A broker may legally deliver a Controller's own
subscription copy of that same publish after the PUBACK, since MQTT does not
order the two; when that happened, the Controller mistook its own late echo
for live operator intent and relinquished automatic restoration ownership.
Keep the marker claimable for a short, bounded mqtt.router_echo_grace_seconds
window (default 2s) after the PUBACK instead of clearing it immediately.
Genuine external/operator commands are unaffected: once the grace window
elapses, a matching payload is still correctly treated as operator intent
and ownership is relinquished as before.
Verified with deterministic fake-clock unit tests plus a real Mosquitto
broker integration test (tests/test_router_echo_mosquitto_integration.py,
skipped automatically when Docker is unavailable).
The evidence gate on enqueue_download blocked every download, including a
URL that could only land in a slot store.reserve_download already proves is
empty and unguarded. After a Controller-only restart with the Player still
connected and idle, no fresh detailed status ever arrives, so this could
deadlock all new ingest indefinitely even though nothing unsafe would occur.
Narrow the gate to only require fresh evidence when the URL already occupies
a non-empty slot (refresh/reuse). Deletion, expiry, and cleanup/recovery
gating are unchanged.
Media