setup: Playwright Chromium download failure aborts setup before skills/hooks/migrations land #1902

Summary

./setup is structured so that the riskiest step (Playwright Chromium
download) runs before several lower-risk steps (skill linking, hook
installation, version migrations). When the riskiest step fails, the
script exits 1 mid-run and the lower-risk steps never get a chance to
complete.

This means a user on a flaky network, a corporate machine with a
locked-down bunx, or hitting the Bun-on-Windows pipe bug
(oven-sh/bun#4253) ends up with a half-installed gstack: bun may be
copied, the browse binary may be built, but the actual user-facing
artifacts (skills, hooks, plan-tune machinery, gbrain regen) are
missing. A re-run of ./setup does the same thing — dies at the same
step — and the user has no easy path to a working install minus
browser features.

Failure modes observed

The current setup order interleaves trivial filesystem ops, expensive
compute, settings.json mutations, and external network/sudo steps:

1. Build browse binary (network: bun install)
2. Install Playwright Chromium (network, sudo, package manager) — may exit 1
3. Ensure ~/.gstack/projects/ exists (trivial filesystem)
4. Install for Claude (filesystem)
   5-6. Install for Codex / Kiro / Factory / OpenCode (filesystem)
5. .agents/ sidecar symlinks (filesystem)
6. Run version migrations (filesystem)
7. First-time welcome + legacy cleanup (filesystem)
8. Team mode hook install in settings.json (mutation)
9. Plan-tune hook install in settings.json (mutation)

Concrete user-facing breakage when step 2 fails:

Even the trivial mkdir -p "$HOME/.gstack/projects" happens AFTER the
Playwright step, so a brand-new user without ~/.gstack/ ends up
without it.

Proposal

Reorder setup so steps run in increasing order of failure probability:

• Phase A — pure filesystem (~/.gstack/, welcome, GBrain detection
  file scan). Cannot fail in practice.
• Phase B — local compute: bun build, skill linking, version
  migrations, GBrain SKILL.md regen. Fails only on bun bugs, fully
  reproducible locally.
• Phase C — settings.json mutation: team-mode and plan-tune hooks.
  Fails only if settings.json is malformed, fully reversible.
• Phase D — external network / sudo / package managers: coreutils
  on macOS, emoji font on Linux, Playwright Chromium. Highest fail risk.

With this order, a Phase D failure leaves the user with a working gstack
install minus browser-driven features (/qa, /design-review,
make-pdf, sidebar, /pair-agent). Re-running ./setup retries only
the failed phase since A-C are idempotent.

A separate (smaller) follow-up — already in flight as #1900, coordinated
with #1838 — converts the Playwright exit 1 paths to best-effort warns
so even a re-run failure is non-fatal.

Related

• Restructure setup phases to improve failure handling and fix bugs #1883 — original bundled PR that combined the phase reorder with two
  unrelated bug fixes and a Playwright behavior change. Per review
  request, that PR is being split into three:
  • v1.57.10.0 fix(setup): route gen:skill-docs through bun_cmd; drop tail -3 pipe that masks bun failures #1898 — surgical bug fixes (bun_cmd routing + tail -3 pipe)
  • v1.57.4.0 fix(setup): Playwright Chromium failure becomes best-effort warn, not exit 1 #1900 — Playwright exit 1 → best-effort warn (coordinates with fix(setup): pin Playwright browser install to bundled version so headed browse connect works (#1829) #1838)
  • PR for this issue — the phase reorder itself
• fix(setup): pin Playwright browser install to bundled version so headed browse connect works (#1829) #1838 — Pin Playwright install to the bundled version (touches the
  same Playwright block).
• Playwright error - ChildProcess.stdio from child_process.spawn({ stdio: ["pipe"] }) has only null values oven-sh/bun#4253 — Bun-on-Windows pipe bug that Phase D needs to
  tolerate, not abort over.