`uv pip install -e .` has to replace the console-script shims, so
_quarantine_running_hermes_exe must first rename the running hermes.exe out
of the way. That rename fails whenever any child process spawned from that
hermes.exe is still alive: on Windows a child inherits a handle on the parent
image. It is the inherited handle, not the trampoline, that pins the file --
killing the child makes the identical rename succeed, and the shim flavour
(uv trampoline vs distlib launcher) makes no difference.
The updater spawns such children itself (npx cache warm, memory-provider
refresh -- hindsight-api runs as a daemon with --idle-timeout 300 and outlives
the step that started it), so this presents as a race rather than a hard
failure: the same hand-off succeeds on one run and dies on the next. Step 2's
shim-unlock preflight cannot catch it, because the shim genuinely is unlocked
at that moment; the pinning child appears later, during the update.
When the rename loses that race, _schedule_replace_on_reboot is the last
resort -- and MOVEFILE_DELAY_UNTIL_REBOOT writes to HKLM, so it needs
elevation. A Desktop-driven update is not elevated, so it returns
ERROR_ACCESS_DENIED, `uv pip install -e .` exits 2, and the ZIP fallback
repeats the identical sequence. The desktop build stage is then never reached
while the pre-build clean has already removed apps/desktop/release, leaving an
install whose Start Menu shortcut points at a Hermes.exe that no longer exists.
Running the same code as `python.exe -m hermes_cli.main update` puts the
inherited handles on python.exe, which uv never has to replace.
posix.sh is deliberately untouched: unlinking a running executable is legal
there, so the equivalent call is harmless.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Sascha
5bfb7ee42f