A plugin can be enabled in config, enabled in plugin state, present on disk
with a valid manifest and an importable entry point -- and simply absent from
the running process, with nothing anywhere to say why.
That is not hypothetical. hockey-scoreboard on a live rig is enabled in both
places, imports cleanly when loaded by hand, and is listed in the Vegas plugin
order, but is not among the 22 plugins the process actually holds. Establishing
even that much meant comparing cache-file mtimes to find it had last run three
days earlier. The journal had nothing, because discovery does not report what
it declines to load.
Two paths were silent. A directory with no manifest.json was skipped without
comment, which is defensible until it is the thing you are trying to explain.
Quieter still, a manifest that parsed but carried no "id" was read
successfully and then dropped on the floor -- no warning, no trace, and the
plugin simply does not exist as far as the rest of the system is concerned.
Both now log a warning naming the directory and the reason.
This does not explain the rig above; its manifest has an id. It makes the next
occurrence diagnosable from the journal instead of from file timestamps.
Reverting the change fails both tests. 65 plugin-system tests pass.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01STMbQE4YctTacQXfbYqKuW
