Files
superpowers/skills
Jesse Vincent 9f04f06351 Fix owner-PID lifecycle monitoring for cross-platform reliability
Two bugs caused the brainstorm server to self-terminate within 60s:

1. ownerAlive() treated EPERM (permission denied) as "process dead".
   When the owner PID belongs to a different user (Tailscale SSH,
   system daemons), process.kill(pid, 0) throws EPERM — but the
   process IS alive. Fixed: return e.code === 'EPERM'.

2. On WSL, the grandparent PID resolves to a short-lived subprocess
   that exits before the first 60s lifecycle check. The PID is
   genuinely dead (ESRCH), so the EPERM fix alone doesn't help.
   Fixed: validate the owner PID at server startup — if it's already
   dead, it was a bad resolution, so disable monitoring and rely on
   the 30-minute idle timeout.

This also removes the Windows/MSYS2-specific OWNER_PID="" carve-out
from start-server.sh, since the server now handles invalid PIDs
generically at startup regardless of platform.

Tested on Linux (magic-kingdom) via Tailscale SSH:
- Root-owned owner PID (EPERM): server survives ✓
- Dead owner PID at startup (WSL sim): monitoring disabled, survives ✓
- Valid owner that dies: server shuts down within 60s ✓

Fixes #879
2026-03-25 11:03:53 -07:00
..