Bug Report: Version mismatch, ambiguous success state, and unnecessary Windows escaping #41

Summary

After a thorough source code review of server.py, __init__.py, and pyproject.toml, I identified three technical issues.

Issue 1: Version mismatch between __init__.py and pyproject.toml

Severity: Low (maintenance)

__init__.py has never been updated since initial creation. Any code that reads codexmcp.__version__ will get the stale 0.1.0 instead of the actual 0.7.4.

Suggested fix: Either sync __init__.py manually, or use hatch-vcs / importlib.metadata to derive __version__ from pyproject.toml as the single source of truth.

Issue 2: Ambiguous success state — partial failure is treated as success

Severity: Medium

In server.py, both the "fail" and "error" handling paths use:

success = False if len(agent_messages) == 0 else success

This means: if Codex has already emitted some agent_message text before crashing or failing, the final result will still be {"success": True, ...} with potentially truncated or incomplete content.

The caller has no way to distinguish between:

• A fully completed response
• A response that was cut short mid-way due to an error

Suggested fix: Consider one of:

1. Always set success = False on fail/error, and include agent_messages in the error result so no data is lost.
2. Add a "partial": true flag to the result when errors occurred after some agent messages were already received.
3. At minimum, always append err_message to the result (even when success: true), so callers can detect issues.

Issue 3: windows_escape() is unnecessary and potentially harmful under shell=False

Severity: Medium

The codex tool applies windows_escape(PROMPT) when os.name == "nt":

if os.name == "nt":
    PROMPT = windows_escape(PROMPT)

However, the command is executed via:

process = subprocess.Popen(
    popen_cmd,
    shell=False,   # <-- arguments passed directly, no shell interpretation
    ...
)

With shell=False, the OS passes arguments directly to the child process without any shell parsing. The escape function is therefore unnecessary, and worse, it corrupts the prompt content:

• A literal newline \n in the user's prompt becomes the two characters \n
• A literal quote " becomes \\"
• Backslashes are doubled: \ → \

This means Codex receives mangled prompts on Windows that differ from what the user intended.

Suggested fix: Remove the windows_escape() call entirely, or guard it behind shell=True (which is not recommended for security reasons). Since shell=False is the correct and safe approach, the escape function is not needed.

Environment

• Codex CLI: v0.115.0
• CodexMCP: v0.7.4 (from pyproject.toml)
• Python: 3.12+
• Reviewed commit: latest on main branch as of 2026-03-24

Thank you for this useful project! Happy to submit PRs for any of these if you'd like.