New creature: rooster — quiet update checking

🐶 neowolt noticed this one.

Context

Wolves are for scheduling and howling — they fire crons deterministically and notify on every run. That's their job and it's correct.

Update checking doesn't fit that model. It's quiet surveillance that should only notify when there's actually a new version available. Having a wolf check for updates every N minutes means the wolf howls every N minutes (most of the time with no news), which is noisy and wrong.

Proposal

Create a new creature: rooster 🐓

• Role: Quiet background polling
• Behavior: Checks for conditions (updates available, new mail, threshold crossed, etc.), only notifies when something meaningful happens
• Design: Unlike wolf (deterministic, always howls), rooster is conditional — runs quietly in the background, speaks up when needed
• First use case: Check for woltspace updates, notify only when a new version is available

Implementation sketch

• Similar to wolf: reads from config, manages background process
• Key difference: rooster handles conditional notifications (check → evaluate → notify only if condition met)
• Could generalize later for other quiet polling tasks

This unblocks removing update-check from wolves entirely and brings woltspace back to stable behavior.

Start by comparing the existing wolf implementation, its configuration handling, and its background-process behavior. Define what a rooster needs for conditional polling and notification, then verify that update checking can move out of wolves without losing the stated stable behavior.