An artist's hero was re-discovered every 24 hours through a tier that fails
per-name, and the stale manifest was deleted on the way in -- before the
replacement lookup had run. So one bad discovery day did not merely fail to
refresh a hero, it destroyed the good one first and left the artist blank.
On this machine that took the persisted store from 26 artists down to 3;
Crazy P, MSPAINT, Sword II, Hermeth, Billy Cobb, Pond, Weezer, Daft Punk and
King Krule all had correct banners on disk that nothing would ever read again.
Three changes:
- The manifest TTL goes from 24 hours to 30 days, matching the cover
resolution horizon. A press photo is still the artist's press photo a month
later; it does not go stale the way metadata does.
- Reading a manifest no longer destroys it. Stale and older-recipe manifests
are retained as a floor and only replaced once a lookup returns something
better, which also migrates them forward to the current recipe. Only files
that are unusable -- oversized, unparseable, or belonging to another artist
-- are removed.
- A failed hero discovery is detected by an EMPTY BANNER LIST, not a None:
catalog_artist_art returns Some as soon as the Deezer profile resolves, so
the previous None check could never fire, and an empty result would also
overwrite good banners whenever logos were present.
Also widens discovery so fewer artists need the floor at all. The query ladder
gains the bare artist name: decorated queries can collapse a rare artist onto a
popular entity sharing a word -- every "Hana Vu ... photo" phrasing returns the
Japanese group HANA (525 of 525 cards, quoting included), while the bare name
returns her real press photos with 16 of 17 passing the identity gate as
Strong. The gate, not the query, is what filters.
And a near-empty Bing page now counts as degraded. The retry test was
is_empty(), which let the commonest degraded shape through: a one-card page of
something unrelated, cached as that artist's verdict for a quarter hour.
Measured 15 of 30 waves for MSPAINT and Billy Cobb. The richer of the two
reads is kept so a thin retry cannot lose a good first answer.
Verified live: Crazy P, MSPAINT, Sword II and Hermeth all render heroes again.
KeelrLeek
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