Desktop 0.1.7: the installer could not find its own engine

We handed a colleague Meronq Desktop 0.1.6 for another repo. Connect never ran. The window showed Cannot locate sidecar entry and told them to run pnpm fetch:node — a command that only makes sense inside this monorepo. The sidecar (the local HTTP engine behind handshake and memory) had not started at all.

This is a Desktop release, not a sprint close. Say "0.1.7 is out".

What 0.1.6 actually looked up

Packaged Desktop is supposed to spawn bundled Node plus sidecar.mjs from installer resources (ADR-0010). The Rust host looked for meronq-node-<triple>.exe only under CARGO_MANIFEST_DIR/binaries/ — a compile-time path on the machine that built the app. On the builder's PC that folder still exists, so dogfood worked. On %LOCALAPPDATA%\Meronq Desktop\ it does not.

sidecar.mjs in the resource dir never got a chance: without Node the launch plan fell through to sidecar/src/run-server.ts from the meronq source tree, which the colleague also does not have. The watchdog then retried the same miss five times.

What 0.1.7 looks up

The host searches, in order: the directory of the running exe (meronq-node.exe next to meronq-desktop.exe on Windows), the Tauri resource dir, then the compile-time binaries path for tauri:dev. Runtime JS is resource_dir/runtime/sidecar.mjs, with the same next-to-exe fallbacks. If the JS bundle is present but bundled Node is not, system node is a last resort.

The error for a broken install now says to reinstall from meronq.pages.dev/download. pnpm fetch:node stays a developer footnote. The watchdog does not loop on a missing entry.

React chrome

This tag also ships the Desktop UI shell (ADR-0025): sidebar, one focused region, Assistants as its own screen, map as a parked vis-network island. Sidecar HTTP and CEM are the same APIs. That is the chrome; the reason to cut 0.1.7 today is the installer.

Getting it

• Windows: installer. Existing 0.1.6 installs should see Check for updates once this version is on the channel.
• macOS: Apple silicon · Intel. In-app updates apply when latest.json lists signed darwin platforms.

Connect the project folder (lockstock, meronq, anything with a README). Do not clone this repo into that folder, and do not run the pnpm line from the 0.1.6 error there.

What did not ship

ADR-0022 (documents Meronq leaves in the project) is still Proposed. Hashnode distribution is still blocked without a publication id. Refresh Memory still writes tool-level access rows (memory_sync / memory_graph) — that is Sprint 23 telemetry, not this patch.