Windows Desktop Update: UnicodeDecodeError during lazy backend refresh

[robeldojune-star]

Bug Description

Steps to Reproduce

Expected Behavior

Actual Behavior

Affected Component

Other

Messaging Platform (if gateway-related)

No response

Debug Report

hermes debug share --local

Operating System

Windows 11

Python Version

No response

Hermes Version

No response

Additional Logs / Traceback (optional)

Root Cause Analysis (optional)

No response

Proposed Fix (optional)

No response

Are you willing to submit a PR for this?

• I'd like to fix this myself and submit a PR

[teknium1]

Fixed in PR #70850 (merged, commit ead23aa). Every text=True subprocess capture in the desktop/TUI backend process now passes encoding="utf-8", errors="replace", so locale-mismatched bytes (GBK/cp936, cp950, cp1252, cp1251, ...) degrade to U+FFFD instead of raising UnicodeDecodeError inside subprocess._readerthread / the drain threads and killing the gateway.

Hardened sites: tui_gateway/server.py (slash worker, cli.exec, shell.exec, quick-command exec, pdftoppm — salvaged from @Sahil-SS9's #61978 with authorship preserved), hermes_cli/web_server.py (desktop update panel git log, memory-provider setup, npm install, docker probe), hermes_cli/banner.py (startup update check), tui_gateway/host_supervisor.py, tui_gateway/compute_host.py.

The periodic-crash pattern several of these reports share was the update check itself: a 🐛 emoji landed in a commit subject on main (84db32484f), and its third UTF-8 byte (0x90) is undefined in several ANSI code pages — so every behind-main Windows install crashed on each refresh cycle. Update to latest and this should be gone; reopen with a fresh traceback if anything similar persists.