Slack

The relay between one checkout's overseer mailbox and one private Slack channel. Mailbox reads use the mailbox package installed beside Slack inside the relay process. Writes use the bound checkout's lane-mail. The relay keeps its own record under tmp/slack/.

.agents/skills/slack/scripts/slack setup [--root ROOT] [--name NAME | --take CHANNEL_ID]
.agents/skills/slack/scripts/slack listen --root ROOT [--root ROOT]... [--once]
.agents/skills/slack/scripts/slack listen --status --root ROOT [--root ROOT]...
.agents/skills/slack/scripts/slack post [--root ROOT] [--channel ID] --text TEXT [--mention] [--file PATH] [--thread TS] [--update TS]
.agents/skills/slack/scripts/slack read --channel ID (--ts TS | --latest N)
.agents/skills/slack/scripts/slack compact [--root ROOT]...
.agents/skills/slack/scripts/slack install --root ROOT [--root ROOT]... [--print]

What each verb does, every setting, and every keyed line: slack --help. Python 3.8 or newer, standard library only.

Rules

• A root is a checkout with the orch skill installed. A relay serves every root it is given, and one relay serves one checkout, held by an OS lock.
• One relay per Slack app. Slack sends each owner message to one of an app's open Socket Mode connections, so a second relay on the same app takes part of the first one's messages, and each waits for the first relay's next reconnect. Each machine runs its own app and one relay over every root on it.
• The mailbox package owns mailbox reads, numbering and cursors. The relay reuses its store. An owner's words land through lane-mail send --delivery-id; who judges a repeat is DEVELOPMENT.md § Constraints.
• A delivery prints delivered with its Slack ts, mailbox id and path=live|catch-up. Eyes failures print a keyed cause and retry on the next poll; already_reacted settles the mark.
• Owner answers, question closure and ruling notices follow orch communication-modes.md § Owner asks.
• Every outbound text and file passes the secret-value pattern the orch skill ships at references/secret-value.ere. A match is refused, journaled and never sent.
• Webhooks cannot work through a proxy that swaps headers only. Every message post uses chat.postMessage.
• A package update reaches a running relay by itself: each poll fingerprints its code and the installed sibling mailbox reader definitions, and a change that holds for two polls re-executes the relay in the same process, which reads its settings again. The reload replaces the reader and its cached results. The reload waits while the relay reconnects or holds a refused live delivery. listen --status shows the running code as code=.
• A relay reads its settings at start. After changing SLACK_OWNERS, run slack setup for each bound root: it invites an added owner to the channel and restarts the unit install wrote. A plain restart drops a removed owner but never invites an added one. After changing either token, restart the relay.
• A threaded directive's parent carries every owner and app thread message its reader generation has not received: schemas/journal.md § Parent pointers. Follow orch § Thread delivery when reading it.
• The channel binding is installation state written by setup, never a setting. The alert channel is the caller's --channel argument.
• read --channel needs no binding or owner settings. It uses the same token route as post --channel. --ts reads a message and its replies; --latest N reads the newest positive N top-level messages. Both print oldest first. Each line is slack: ts=TS edited=TS|- bot=ID text=TEXT, with user=ID instead of bot=ID for a user message. An absent author is user=-. text= is the last field; it preserves Slack markup and escapes backslash, newline and carriage return as \\, \n and \r. An empty channel prints nothing and exits 0. API refusals use the existing keyed stderr format and exit 2.
• Settings live in the project's kendex.settings.toml and the two tokens, SLACK_BOT_TOKEN and SLACK_APP_TOKEN, in its private env file: kendex.settings.toml.example.

Message standard

• markup.py owns outbound tracker links and their representation. The sibling Linear skill's teams keys action reads workspace keys in each root and selects Linear ids. Linear keys and the workspace URL key are cached per root for a day. A missing or failed read leaves Linear ids unlinked with one tracker-links-unavailable notice per root and process.
• Pull requests use OWNER/REPO#N, or REPO#N and #N in the sending repository. Commit hashes link only when Git finds one commit in that repository. An unresolved reference stays unchanged with one reference-link-unavailable stderr line per distinct reference in an outbound message.
• The relay and slack post keep secret-pattern matches unexpanded for refusal. Other bare tracker ids link before the final secret check and Markdown cap. Existing links, Slack angle tokens, bare URLs, inline code and fenced code stay literal. Never put a tracker id in a code span.
• slack post text without --file, and the relay's ask, notice and answer posts, go out as standard Markdown, which Slack renders: **bold**, lists, headings, links and code blocks.
• Slack takes at most 12,000 characters of standard Markdown. slack post refuses an input already longer than that text-too-long; send the long part as a file. Link expansion across the cap selects mrkdwn for both outbound paths. The relay also posts a longer input as mrkdwn, its Markdown marks shown as typed, so an ask still reaches the owner before its deadline.
• After confirmed tracker posting, an ask carries its draft on the item. Other asks post their draft, the text the owner approves, as one code block, never linked, so the owner reads it as typed. Past the cap its mrkdwn block escapes &, < and >; mrkdwn cannot show a run of three backticks inside a block, so such a draft is refused text-not-literal and not sent.
• A file's comment, the text beside --file or a notice's --attach, renders as Slack's own mrkdwn markup, not standard Markdown. It is outside the 12,000-character cap, and Slack's own message limits still bound it. How to write it: communication § References and markup.
• The words and markup of every post follow communication.

Doctor row

slack listen --status prints one slack: slack-relay=ROOT state=ok|failing|stale|never line per root, with connection=connected|reconnecting|disconnected|unknown and connection_since=, unknown since last_poll for a record an older relay wrote without the connection fields; a never line carries only fix=. A state other than ok carries fix=. A relay reconnecting past the bound the status record states reads failing. The fields of the row: schemas/journal.md § The status record.