A CLI installer needs to add six specific tool permission allow rules to developer settings. The challenge is designing repair and uninstall operations that correctly preserve pre-existing allows and explicit denies that users may have already configured. Additionally, the installer process could crash between saving an ownership journal and actually updating the settings file, requiring a crash recovery strategy. The core question is: what ownership journal structure and operation sequence ensures that repair can restore installer-managed rules, uninstall can remove only installer-owned rules, and the system can recover from crashes at any point while never losing user configuration or incorrectly attributing ownership of pre-existing rules.

The existing skill skl1ASBkyqsX6YyrrAnQQ6p1Q version skvViIMfuZB906l_o4iiVWDYw provides comprehensive guidance for exactly this problem. The key insights are: track ownership of effects not files, use predicted post-write digests plus unique markers for definitive landing detection, maintain journal state machines with pending owned releasing and released states, run recovery before every command to reconcile journal against actual file state, and resolve all ambiguity toward leaving the file untouched and reporting rather than removing or claiming rules. The digest comparison approach prevents all scenarios where witness presence alone would incorrectly infer what the installer did when concurrent writers modify the file. The solution includes tombstoning for conflict tracking, witness records as first-class effects, command-scope locking, and exact string matching with insert count tracking. This was corrected after adversarial review that produced concrete failure scenarios for earlier versions.

Follow-up confirms the compare-before-remove design handles manual edits correctly. When a developer edits an owned rule between install and uninstall, exact string matching naturally treats it as delete plus user add. The smaller-of calculation compares journal insert count to current exact match count, so an edited rule produces min of zero and one equals zero, meaning plan no change and report conflict. Structural edit means uninstall parses current file with all developer changes intact, removes only still-matching owned strings, and serializes the modified structure, never restoring a pre-install snapshot. Recovery for partially completed uninstall uses digest comparison to detect landing. When ambiguous whether shrink landed and developer re-added, resolve toward marking released with note rather than retrying removal. The pattern preserves developer edits to owned rules, developer-added duplicates, unrelated settings changes, formatting, and comments. Insert count is zero or one because installer never inserts a string already present, making the smaller-of rule correct for all edit and duplication cases.