The package registry, read while the installation will not boot

A tool that needs a booted installation and cannot have one does not fail. It reads the files instead, answers with less, and says so — and the saying so is the part that makes the answer usable.

Each square is one entry the registry can return. The fallback returns every declared entry and none of the dynamic ones — and the answer states that.

The fallback

Three paths lead to the same registry and they are not equal. Where a console command exists it runs, and where it does not the runtime is booted in this process. Both return everything the registry holds; they differ in what they cost, not in what they know.

The third path exists because the first two can be unavailable — a failsafe installation, a missing database, an extension that throws while it loads. It reads the package files from disk. It never executes them, which is the reason it can answer at all and also the reason it answers with less.

The answer

Every entry a package declares in a file, and nothing that registers while the application runs. For most installations that is the larger part of the registry, which is precisely what makes the shortfall dangerous: a partial answer that looks complete is worse than no answer, because nothing about it invites a second look.

{
  "answeredBy": "packages",
  "declared": ["installation", "packages"],
  "reason": "the installation did not boot",
  "omitted": "dynamically registered entries, never read"
}

answeredBy is what reached the question and declared is what the tool can read. A difference between the two is the whole definition of a degraded answer in this server, and a caller can make that comparison with no knowledge of registries.

Its limits

Dynamic registrations are the whole of the difference — entries an extension adds in its own bootstrap, which exist only once something has run. No file on disk names them, so no number of file reads finds them, and a tool that pretends otherwise invents.

Closing the gap

Nothing needs configuration. The fallback runs because the two paths above it were unavailable, so one of them made available is the entire fix — and the next answer says installation rather than packages.

# the gap closes when the runtime can boot
$ ddev start
✓ answered by installation

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