dsh-plugin-reducer: find a minimal broken plugin set

When this tool is useful

Use it only after you have a repeatable profile failure and reason to suspect interaction between installed out-of-tree bundles. It deliberately lives outside the DSH plugin tree, so it can still run when that tree cannot load.

• A works alone and B works alone, but A+B fails.
• The failure reproduces through a config or Web-start probe.
• The source profile must not be rewritten while subsets are tested.
• You need JSON output for an issue or another diagnostic tool.

What 1-minimal means

Every member of the returned set is necessary for that tested failure: removing any one stops it. This is not a promise that no smaller, different failure-inducing set exists. The result is tied to the probe, profile state, DSH version, and installed package graph.

Install the prerelease intentionally

Version 0.3.1 is published on the npm next channel and remains a prerelease. Pin it so the diagnostic itself does not change between runs.

npm install --global dsh-plugin-reducer@0.3.1
dsh-plugin-reducer --profile web --probe web --report reducer-report.json

Read the safety boundary

A fresh shadow DSH_HOME isolates configuration and protects the source profile from edits. It is not a security sandbox: already-installed plugins execute with the user’s normal permissions and reuse the profile’s node_modules. Review the plugin set before running it.

What to preserve in the report

Keep the DSH version, profile fingerprint, probe choice, candidate bundle list, tested configurations, 1-minimal result, and whether removing each member cleared the failure. Inspect redaction before sharing the JSON outside your machine.