Controls no longer render as plain text when a module ships a duplicate of a portal assembly

Some pages came up with their controls rendered as plain text instead of as buttons, cards and stacks — the raw shape of the control, printed out, where the styled view should have been. The portal's own health page said what had happened, in a line that read like housekeeping: one module is landed but not yet loaded.

Both statements had the same cause. A plugin package ships its code as a bundle, and a bundle carries the package's own assembly plus anything it needs that the portal does not already have. The rule that decided "does the portal already have this?" was a list, written and maintained by hand in each plugin repository — and a list goes out of date the moment something moves. When it did, a package began shipping a second copy of an assembly the portal ships too.

The portal cannot use both. Two copies of one assembly name are one identity to it: it keeps the first one it loads and the second is simply never there. When the copy that lost held the views — the components that draw a control on screen — the portal has the control but nothing to draw it with, so it falls back to printing the control instead. Nothing errors, nothing is missing from any log; a page just renders wrong.

The rule is no longer a list. When a package is built, the build now looks at the portal it is being built for and measures what that portal actually ships — the assemblies alongside it, the record it publishes of what it was compiled against, and the modules it carries in its own module folder — and drops anything the portal already has from the package. Nothing the portal does not have is dropped, so a package that genuinely needs to bring an assembly still brings it.

Measured across the plugin catalog when this was found: 14 of 37 packages were carrying 27 such duplicate copies. They are gone from the next build of each package, and the check that holds a portal back from updating onto an inconsistent set of packages — which is what caught this — now has nothing to hold.