Reloading a package silently discards the Configuration it was loaded with

This issue was triaged from bugs/dan/0-reloading-packages, one of the 857 files removed from the pre-GitHub bugs/ tree by d2c8d27826 and catalogued in #36. The commentary below was written by Claude (Claude Opus 5, via Claude Code), not by @d-torrance, whose account posted it -- please weigh it accordingly.

The original file, verbatim

check and installPackage will reload a package on occasion
perhaps they should reload with the same configuration options as the previous time
figure that out

Where it stands today

Still drops the configuration, and the path is short enough to quote.

loadPackage Package forces Reload => true (Core/packages.m2:193), and neither of the two callers
that reload passes Configuration along:

• installPackage.m2:670
• testing.m2:87

So a package loaded with Configuration => {...} comes back with the defaults when check or
installPackage reloads it.

Why it bites quietly

Nothing errors. The package simply behaves as though the user had never configured it — which for a
package whose configuration names an external program or a directory means the failure appears later,
somewhere unrelated, as a missing executable or a wrong path.

Notes for whoever picks this up

The configuration in force is recoverable at the point of reload: it is on the loaded package object
itself, so the fix is plausibly to read it back and pass it rather than to thread it through from the
original call. Compare #4536, another consequence of reloading that this catalogue filed, and
#3852, which added the warning about recreating instances after a reload.

_{open · disposition issue · source of truth: bug-triage/catalog.tsv}

Start at Core/packages.m2:193, then trace the reload callers in installPackage.m2:670 and testing.m2:87. Inspect how the loaded package stores its Configuration and compare behavior when check or installPackage triggers a reload. Done means a configured package retains that configuration after either reload path, with no silent fallback to defaults.