refactor(avatars): drop orphaned app-avatar: symbolic-ref machinery

[tellaho]

Overview

Category: improvement
User Impact: No user-facing change — this removes dead internal plumbing for an avatar feature that was never finished, keeping the codebase honest.

Problem: The app-avatar:<id> symbolic pointer was meant to power curated, selectable avatar sets — letting users pick an agent avatar by symbolic ID instead of baking in one-off URLs. That's the right primitive, but the resolver half was never built / was removed in #1132 (the goose-set collections). What survived was only the parsing + plumbing half: parseGooseAppAvatarId was only ever called by its own validators, and there's no id→image map anywhere in the tree. The machinery stored and round-tripped an ID that nothing could render — a half-bridge to nowhere that added two special-case branches for a capability that doesn't ship.

Solution: Remove the orphaned parsing/plumbing module and collapse its two call sites back to their simple paths. The live persistable-URL import branch is preserved byte-for-byte, so real avatar URLs are untouched; only the dead symbolic-ref handling is dropped. The generic avatar_ref Rust field stays — it's an opaque carrier of real URLs, not specific to app-avatar:.

This spike grew out of the #1202 avatar-plumbing review.

Changes

File changes

desktop/src/shared/avatars/gooseAppAvatarRefs.ts
Deleted the entire parser/validators module (parseGooseAppAvatarId, isGooseAppAvatarRef, toGooseAppAvatarRef). It was an orphan — only ever called by its own validators, with no resolver anywhere to turn an ID into an image.

desktop/src/shared/avatars/gooseAppAvatarRefs.test.mjs
Deleted alongside the module it covered.

desktop/src/features/profile/hooks.ts
Collapsed the skip-fetch guard from isGooseAppAvatarRef(url) ? null : getAvatarSnapshotUrl(url) to a plain getAvatarSnapshotUrl(url). Symbolic refs no longer dodge the snapshot path — nothing ships them anymore, so there's no live regression.

desktop/src/features/agents/ui/personaDialogState.ts
Inlined a local resolveImportedPersonaAvatarUrl + isPersistableAvatarUrl. The persistable-URL branch is byte-for-byte identical to the old module (same [avatarRef, avatarDataUrl] precedence, same ^(?:https?:|data:image/|blob:) regex). Only the dead toGooseAppAvatarRef keep-as-is branch is gone; symbolic refs now drop instead of round-trip — intended, since nothing renders them.

desktop/src-tauri/src/commands/personas.rs
Retired the dead app-avatar: vocabulary in test fixtures (swapped to plain https URLs). Parser behavior unchanged — avatar_ref stays an opaque passthrough of the avatar: frontmatter value.

desktop/src-tauri/src/managed_agents/persona_card_tests.rs
Swapped app-avatar: fixtures to plain https URLs and renamed dead-term tests. The avatar_ref field is retained as a generic opaque carrier (it holds real URLs).

Reproduction Steps

1. Check out tho/drop-orphaned-app-avatar-refs (based on kennylopez-agent-avatar-plumbing).
2. Grep the tree for app-avatar / GooseAppAvatar — confirm zero residual references.
3. Run the desktop suite (desktop-test, typecheck, lint) and Rust suite (rust-tests, desktop-tauri-test) — all green.
4. Exercise persona import with a real http(s): / data:image/ / blob: avatar URL — it's preserved exactly as before. A persona carrying a symbolic app-avatar:<id> ref now drops the ref (no renderer existed for it).

Re-adding later

See #1132 for the breadcrumb. When selectable avatar sets land, the resolver + id→image registry + picker UI get rebuilt alongside this plumbing.

+43 / −142 across 6 files.