Installers could not be published at all: the signing certificate does not
exist yet, and the release pipelines stop at their signing guard. Users had no
way to install a fixed build, so the product was effectively stuck behind a
certificate that takes weeks to obtain.
There is also a second, independent blocker: the download feed sits behind
Cloudflare, which rejects any upload body over about 100 MiB, and the app with
its speech engine exceeds that even when signed.
A portable channel now publishes what can actually be delivered today: the app
compressed into 95 MiB 7z volumes (162 MiB total instead of 243 MiB), a Scoop
bucket for a normal install and uninstall experience, and a verifiable manual
installer script. It is deliberately separate from the auto-update feed, needs
no certificate, and refuses to overwrite an already published version.
Packaging silently tolerates a missing resource directory: electron-builder
prints "file source doesn't exist" and continues, which is how installers that
could not transcribe were published.
Every pipeline that packages the desktop app now builds the sidecar and fails
when the engine or its VAD data is absent, so a release cannot ship without
local transcription.
Desktop clients had two competing update sources: the runtime pointed at a
legacy GitLab registry while the Forgejo packages were filled in by
hardcoded, version-pinned scripts. Operators could not tell which feed was
authoritative, and no release could be reproduced from a tag.
Auto-update now reads a single canonical Forgejo registry feed, updated by
a version-agnostic publisher that runs from the tag on Forgejo, GitLab, and
GitHub CI alike. Channel, minimum supported version, forced install,
full-versus-delta thresholds, staged rollout, and a remote kill switch come
from one policy file the client fetches alongside the feed. Tag creation is
gated on a clean tree, matching version surfaces, and a changelog section.
