[Seagulls]

Scope

Stacked draft on fix/pr139-bounded-wait-20261031 (public PR #25; revised upstream Liquid-co#139). Retains all prior #24 commits through merge parentage and includes the maintainer-requested 30-second interactive topology wait. Not an independent dev-public PR.

Issue #20 documents an independently reproduced loss of tracked coverage: when root transfer is refused, existing LinkGames can log the failure but proceed to delete the original game registration. This change:

• reserves both canonical and alias games in stable order before any persisted linking effects;
• moves alias, mapped-root carry, history adoption, collections and deletion into a single SQLite transaction;
• preserves original registration and previously mapped directories if an intermediate root insert fails;
• keeps existing canonical-name-wins behaviour and does not delete physical files.

Proof

Synthetic local tests against a PR-139-equivalent prototype: busy canonical writer preserves alias registration (GREEN); injected SQL failure during second named-root carry rolls back earlier transfer and alias/history changes (GREEN); ordinary successful carry remains GREEN. Full store and daemon package suites passed locally, but an exact branch-head CI/race/e2e campaign is still required. Tests added in this branch cover both paths.

Integration and limitations

Draft; do not merge ahead of PR Liquid-co#139. When upstream Liquid-co#139 removes its current LinkGames guard in response to maintainer scope feedback, rebase this stacked branch and preserve the new two-game admission mechanism. Do not treat this as daemon cross-process ownership or SaveSync first-copy acceptance. No real save data or deployment.

31 Oct 2026 CI correction and re-stack

Original branch E2E RED on Linux and Windows: TestPeerLink_ListsPeerGamesAndLinksThem and TestMatching_LinkedGameActuallyTransfersData received HTTP 500 from LinkGames while normal track-triggered sync activity was still admitted (failed run). The immediate TryTopologyMutation refusal was incompatible with normal interactive linking; it was not evidence that root data was modified.

Commit b8494cef084d1906ec626f66b1458459d0958c97 reconciles PR #24 with passing PR #25, uses its WaitTopologyMutation primitive with one 30-second deadline and deterministic two-game reservation, and preserves the atomic link transaction. An actual busy timeout now returns HTTP 409 rather than an internal 500; cancellation or failed admission commits no alias, root or history effects. The daemon tests exercise a writer that drains and an indefinitely busy writer with a short test context.

Exact-head CI run is authoritative and was pending when this note was prepared; do not mark ready for merge until it is green and the original failed E2E cases are observed passing.