Comment says mermaid-py spawns a local Node.js subprocess — is that still accurate?

[kiboook]

Hi, first off thanks for this project — really useful tool.

While reading through codewiki/src/be/utils.py, I noticed this comment:

# mermaid-py spawns a Node.js subprocess that can hang indefinitely (e.g. when
# Node.js is missing or the mermaid CLI is misconfigured).  Enabled by default;
# set MERMAID_VALIDATE=0 to disable.
_MERMAID_PY_BROKEN = os.environ.get("MERMAID_VALIDATE", "1") == "0"

and a similar one in pyproject.toml:

# Node.js is required for mermaid-py which validates mermaid diagrams in generated documentation
build-requires = [
    { name = "nodejs", version = ">=14.0.0" }
]

I went and looked at the mermaid-py source itself (checked both 0.8.0, the version pinned in pyproject.toml, and 0.8.4, the current release) to understand the failure mode better, and from what I can tell, Mermaid.__init__ doesn't spawn any subprocess at all — it calls self._make_request_to_mermaid(), which does a plain requests.get() against MERMAID_INK_SERVER (https://mermaid.ink by default). I couldn't find subprocess/child_process/Popen/os.system anywhere in the package.

So it looks like this validation path actually depends on outbound network access to a remote service, not on a local Node.js install — which is a meaningfully different failure mode (e.g. it'd hang/fail on network egress restrictions rather than "Node.js missing", and it does send the diagram content to that third-party service).

Am I missing something here (maybe this was accurate for an older mermaid-py release, or there's a different code path I didn't find)? If this reading is correct, I opened a small PR (#110) that just corrects the wording in both comments — no functional change, since I wasn't sure if the nodejs build-requires is needed for something else in the project.

Happy to be corrected if I misread something.