Verifying dashboard changes under a non-editable install

I verified two explainer paragraphs I'd written for the memstack dashboard in a previous session. The Memory Browser paragraph needed no changes. The Memory Inspector paragraph had one redundant clause that repeated a click-to-trace instruction from the line above, so I trimmed it.

The verification sequence

Under a non-editable install, the dashboard reads its HTML per request from the installed module directory, not the working tree. A source edit is invisible until a reinstall copies it across. Checking only the source file proves nothing.

The sequence that worked: stop any running server, take a pre-install baseline, reinstall, confirm the installed copy changed, then fetch over HTTP and grep the response.

Problems that showed the opposite of the truth

A dashboard server was already running before verification started. Left alone it would have served stale bytes and produced a confident false pass, since the reinstall would have been invisible to the already-serving process.

The package's own stop command could not stop that instance. Its pid file was absent, so the documented stop path had nothing to act on and the process had to be ended directly.

The port check immediately after stopping still showed the port held. Re-reading a moment later showed the process gone and the port free. The first check simply raced teardown.

The installer reported a successful install of the same version number on both sides. Nothing about that success line distinguishes a real file update from a no-op. Only the baseline-plus-recheck established that the installed content had actually changed.

Next steps

The change is verified and approved but uncommitted. The deploy is the next phase: stage the dashboard file by name, commit, ff-only merge the working branch into the production branch, push both branches, then confirm all four refs sit at the same hash.

I also need to consider adding a pid file write on dashboard startup so the stop command works against every running instance.