`hermes update` calls `_warn_stale_dashboard_processes()` to warn about
dashboard processes still running the pre-update Python backend. On
Windows, that scan shells out to `wmic process get ProcessId,CommandLine
/FORMAT:LIST` with `text=True` and no explicit encoding.
`wmic` emits text in the system code page (e.g. cp936 on zh-CN locales),
not UTF-8. Without an explicit `encoding=`, Python's default UTF-8
decoder crashes the subprocess reader thread with
`UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xd0 ...`. In
Python 3.11 that crash is silently absorbed: `subprocess.run()` returns
a `CompletedProcess` with `result.stdout = None`, the next line calls
`result.stdout.split("\n")`, and `hermes update` aborts with the
exact `AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'split'`
trace reported in #17049.
Fix: pass `encoding="utf-8", errors="ignore"` so undecodable bytes
cannot take down the reader thread (the parsing only matches the ASCII
prefixes `CommandLine=` and `ProcessId=`, so dropping non-UTF-8 bytes
is safe), and short-circuit when `result.stdout is None` as a defensive
guard for environments where the reader thread still fails for other
reasons.
This is the same root cause as #17074 (which patches
`hermes_cli/gateway._scan_gateway_pids` for the `hermes setup` path).
That PR does not touch `_warn_stale_dashboard_processes`, so
`hermes update` remains broken on the same locales until this lands.
Regression test in `tests/hermes_cli/test_update_stale_dashboard.py`:
- `test_wmic_invoked_with_utf8_ignore_errors` asserts the explicit
encoding/errors kwargs reach `subprocess.run`.
- `test_wmic_returns_none_stdout_does_not_crash` simulates the
reader-thread-crashed `result.stdout=None` aftermath and asserts the
function returns silently instead of raising AttributeError.
Both new tests fail against clean origin/main (7d4648461) reproducing
the original AttributeError; both pass with this patch. The remaining
3 failures in `tests/hermes_cli/test_cmd_update.py` and
`test_update_autostash.py` are pre-existing baselines on origin/main —
they reproduce identically without this change and are unrelated to
the wmic scan.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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