Field evidence (2026-09-07, production host): the host runs two independent
Hermes instances - a main gateway (user ubuntu, HERMES_HOME=/home/ubuntu/.hermes)
and a demo gateway (user demo, HERMES_HOME=/home/demo/.hermes). Because the
demo process is owned by another user, its /proc/<pid>/fd table is unreadable
and foreign_state_db_holders() falls back to cmdline + _looks_like_hermes().
The demo argv matches Hermes patterns exactly, so it was flagged as an
uninspectable holder of the MAIN instance's state.db even though lsof proved
0 open handles on it. Result: _recover_stale_fts was deferred 42 times across
6 gateway restarts, the fts_stale breadcrumb never cleared, and FTS
self-repair stayed permanently disabled.
#92419 removed substring false positives (journalctl/grep mentioning hermes);
a genuine second instance with a DIFFERENT HERMES_HOME was still misjudged.
Add _argv_scoped_to_other_home(): when the argv of an uninspectable Hermes
process proves it lives under a different /.hermes home (or a state.db
sidecar under a different parent) AND no token references our state.db,
sidecars, or home, do not count it as our holder. Applied to all three
uninspectable branches (holder + two descriptor paths). Ambiguous argv
without absolute-path tokens remains fail-closed, preserving the
conservative intent.
References #92401
Follow-up on the #97330 salvage (#97329): main grew `_canonical_sqlite_path`
after the PR's base; the holder module re-implemented it as a closure. Export
`canonical_sqlite_path` from hermes_state_holders and alias the legacy name in
hermes_state. Drop the unused `_read_proc_argv` / `_looks_like_hermes`
re-exports (no in-tree callers).
Move live-holder inspection into a bounded helper and make repair fail closed when a process still owns the state database, including deleted WAL/SHM descriptors and ambiguous procfs reads.
Preserve the contributor lineage from the original four-commit review train while presenting one coherent release object on current main.
Co-authored-by: fangliquanflq <fangliquan@qq.com>
Co-authored-by: ciabata <296402666+ciabata-git@users.noreply.github.com>
TaoMasterCoder