The in-process cron ticker (cron/scheduler_provider.py) caught only
`Exception` and logged at DEBUG, so a `SystemExit`/`KeyboardInterrupt`
raised from a misbehaving provider SDK or agent retry path killed the
ticker thread silently. The gateway PROCESS stayed up, so `hermes cron
status` — which only checks `find_gateway_pids()` — kept reporting
"✓ jobs will fire automatically" while no jobs ever fired (#32612,
#32895).
This makes ticker death survivable and detectable:
- The ticker loop now catches `BaseException` and logs at ERROR with a
traceback, so a single bad tick no longer tears the thread down and
the failure is visible in the gateway log.
- The loop records a heartbeat (`cron/ticker_heartbeat`, epoch seconds)
on startup and after every tick — best-effort, never raised into the
loop. Both ticker entry points (the gateway and the desktop fallback
in web_server.py) funnel through `InProcessCronScheduler.start`, so one
heartbeat site covers both.
- `hermes cron status` now reads the heartbeat age: if the gateway is
running but the heartbeat is stale (> 200s, i.e. several missed ~60s
ticks), it reports the ticker as STALLED and suggests a restart instead
of falsely claiming jobs will fire. A missing heartbeat (older build /
never ran) is treated as "unknown", not "dead".
Adds tests for BaseException survival, per-iteration heartbeat recording,
heartbeat round-trip/age, staleness detection, and silent-write-failure.
Salvaged from #49660 (BaseException survival on current structure),
extended with the heartbeat + honest-status reporting that the earlier
(pre-refactor) watchdog PRs #35616 and #33849 proposed.
Fixes#32612Fixes#32895
Co-authored-by: banditburai <promptsiren@gmail.com>
Co-authored-by: sweetcornna <96944678+sweetcornna@users.noreply.github.com>
