Step 10e was written as a removal release: delete the fallback read
path once the directories are empty. That has the same flaw as gating
deletion on an empty tail, one level up — sidecars are local disk, so
no release can know that every instance has drained.
The only removal that can actually be written is "if the tier is gone,
return". `initialize` now probes the size directories once at boot;
when absent, every fallback read short-circuits on a relaxed atomic
load and touches no filesystem. The code stays, costs nothing, and can
be deleted whenever — or never.
Two things had to change for absence to be reachable at all:
* `initialize` no longer creates the directories. It create_dir_all-ed
all three at every boot, so the import job removed them and the next
restart put them back — the absence this gates on was unreachable by
construction. Found on a sandbox where the job had drained the tier
and a restart left three empty directories behind. Nothing has
written a sidecar since step 10d2, so there was nothing to create
them for.
* The probe tests the size directories, not the root. On macOS Finder
leaves a .DS_Store in the root, which blocks remove_dir there
permanently; gating on the root would keep the fallback alive on
every developer machine for a reason unrelated to thumbnails. No size
directory means no sidecar.
Every sidecar read and existence check now goes through `read_sidecar`
/ `sidecar_exists`, so the guard exists once rather than at each of the
twelve sites that built a path and read it — the build-then-read pair
was duplicated six times over.
The import job's root removal reports its outcome instead of discarding
it. It is the one result an operator is waiting for, and "directory not
empty" with no sidecars left is a failure worth naming.
Falls open: the flag starts true, so a service constructed without
`initialize` behaves as before. A drain completing mid-process leaves
it stale-true until restart, which costs the same failed opens as
today; it never goes false while sidecars remain.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Edouard Vanbelle
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