`hermes kanban boards export|import` moves a board between machines:
tasks, comments, links, history, and attachments in one .tar.gz.
Two things make this more than a tar of the board directory. The
database is live — kanban runs in WAL mode, so a filesystem copy loses
whatever still sits in the -wal sidecar and tears if the dispatcher
commits mid-copy; export goes through SQLite's online-backup API
instead. And rows carry machine-local state: claims, worker PIDs,
absolute workspace and attachment paths, session ids, and the gateway
chat ids subscribed to task events. Shipping those verbatim is how an
imported board arrives holding a claim owned by a process on someone
else's laptop, or starts pushing task events into a stranger's Telegram
thread. Everything machine-local is stripped on export and re-stripped
on import, since an archive is untrusted input.
Imports always land as a NEW board, auto-suffixing the slug on
collision, so an import can never merge into or overwrite a board that
is already there. Tasks whose workspace was a directory or git worktree
on the source machine are parked in triage rather than left for the
dispatcher to claim and burn into the failure breaker.
Brooklyn Nicholson
3150e444b2