Meeting Lifecycle

An active meeting's lifetime is application-scoped and does not depend on SwiftUI view lifetime. There is at most one active meeting, and MeetingRuntime enforces that — not whichever window happens to be open. Views request a start or a stop and observe what happens; a view appearing, disappearing, being rebuilt or having its window closed never starts, stops or duplicates a meeting.

Four lifetimes

Lifetime	What it is
Process	ScribeKitAppDelegate, and the one MeetingRuntime it holds.
Meeting	From Start to whichever ending arrives; always inside a process.
Window	The single Window scene's NSWindow, closable and reopenable.
View hierarchy	The interface inside that window.

Only the first two have anything to do with whether a meeting runs. See Presentation Lifecycle.

Configuration immutability

A meeting's configuration is fixed when it starts. Title, sources, destination, retention mode and recognition locale are copied at the start and read from that copy for the rest of the run — so editing the setup screen configures the next meeting and cannot reach the one that is running.

One lifecycle answer

MeetingRuntimeStatus is computed from captureState, transcriptionState, persistenceState and audioRetentionState: idle, preparing, transcribing, stopping, completed, or failed with a message. It is a derivation, not a second state machine — nothing assigns it, so the menu bar and the window cannot disagree.

Failure is reported by artifact first (transcript, then recording, then capture, then recognition) and as soon as it exists, including while the teardown it triggered is still running, because a meeting that has lost an artifact is not "stopping normally".

MeetingState remains the persisted domain lifecycle in MeetingSession and in the session record. The runtime's status is a presentation answer that needs a failed case the persisted enum does not have.

Endings

Not every ending is the same ending, and no path that ends a meeting reaches the writer without stating which one it is:

• Completed — someone stopped it, and every durable artifact closed cleanly.
• Interrupted — a subsystem died under the meeting. Artifacts are finalised as far as they can be and everything that reached them is kept, but this is not a completion.
• Failed — a durable artifact or a subsystem could not be brought back.

Closing a transcript and a recording cleanly is a claim about files. Recording a meeting as completed is additionally a claim that the meeting ended because someone ended it. See Failure Semantics.