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# 03 — What the predecessor taught
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A study on 2026-10-04 of the retired predecessor:
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- its 128 module manifests, their hooks, its installer and its sync engine;
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- 3,395 commits of history;
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- what it left on four machines.
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This document holds what bears on the graphical session and on the system layer
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([research 027](../027-the-system-layer-as-modules/00-overview.md)). The evidence is in the
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predecessor's history. A commit is cited here by what it fixed, not by its hash, because the
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repository is private.
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## Keep: what worked
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| pattern | where it shows | in the mesh |
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|---|---|---|
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| ownership marked inside the file: inside the markers is reconciled, outside is kept verbatim | a block marker in a shared file, after an engine that rewrote whole files | kept regions (ADR 0174, ADR 0204) |
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| two writers get two files and an `include`, the include first | the ssh client's configuration, after two writers fought over one file | ADR 0203's two files; research 026 C1 |
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| one writer per file, one authority per action | only the reload watcher restarts the window manager, after three mechanisms each did | ADR 0182 |
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| refuse to write when the source of truth is unreadable; never empty a block because a query found nothing | a block of names was emptied by a failed query | — keep |
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| an unresolved template variable fails the install | a literal unfilled path was installed green | [issue 231](../../04-ISSUES/231-a-misspelled-placeholder-is-written-out-as-text/00-report.md): the mesh still has this gap |
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| prune only what you can prove you placed | stale files from earlier deliveries | ADR 0189 |
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| ensuring never rotates a credential | a silent rotation caused a retry storm, a ban of the shared address and a lost registry | ADR 0114 |
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| vendor only the files you use; never clone and link | three files instead of 77 MB | ADR 0205 |
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| copy, never symlink | a recursive delete followed a link, and every reinstall failed | ADR 0012 |
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| verification says what it did not check | a verifier said *clean* while the secret was still on disk | — keep |
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| alert once per condition | 411 alerts hid a 28-hour outage | ADR 0090 |
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## Do not repeat
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| failure | what it did | the mesh instead | where the mesh is still exposed |
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|---|---|---|---|
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| **Flavors** | variant files and packages per machine type: a gate dropped, the first-seen variant won, packages never installed, the verifier ignored the gate. On the day of the study a desktop carried a laptop model's fragments | one module per piece, assignment per machine (ADR 0174, research 026 §1) | a setting that switches which whole file is rendered is a flavor under another name |
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| **The freeze** | existing values outranked new defaults; templated files were rendered once (*copy if absent*) | files are generated (ADR 0011) | a created-once file (ADR 0087) is a deliberate freeze, and a push must say *kept* |
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| **Adopting drift** | a *merge* strategy made a local edit the record forever; switching strategies clobbered a person's model choice | nothing is read back (ADR 0174) | an edit outside a kept region is overwritten **silently**. The predecessor's *why is this back* loop: the push should name what it overwrote |
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| **Environment templating** | `${VAR}` matched any name; unresolved names stayed literal; comments and destination paths were interpolated | namespaced placeholders; `$` forbidden in contributed values (ADR 0203) | issue 231 |
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| **Hooks with privilege** | install hooks ran `sudo`, `chsh`, `systemctl`, `git clone` and `curl`, and swallowed failures into a warning | the `user` shape, the service shape, archives (ADR 0176, 0177, 0205) | the agent module writes under `/etc` from its own tool through `sudo` (no keep-original, no give-back); the prompt's helper downloads itself unpinned; that the operator escalates without a prompt is assumed by three modules and declared by none (research 027) |
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| **Secrets in environment files** | `.env` files left world-readable; the decryption key beside what it decrypts; a deleted secret stayed in the file, so rotation was a no-op | the vault (ADR 0113, 0114) | a predecessor file of secrets is still sourced into the graphical session on two machines (research 027 Q2) |
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| **Symlinks into a home** | a system file linked into a person's home | ADR 0012 | on the control machine, a fail2ban action file is still a predecessor link into its home tree. Deleting that tree would silently break the repeat-offender jail. The mesh's fail2ban module must own it as a file first |
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| **Green while broken** | a recorded version frozen for four months; a verifier passing what it skipped | ADR 0134, 0145, 0184 | issue 230: a plan waiting for ever reads as healthy |
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## What it means here
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- **Research 026:** the desktop's 88 flavor-gated files and 92 theme variables are the flavor and
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templating failures in one module. Question 1 (one module per piece) and question 6 (hardware
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modules, settings later) are the answer, and nothing in the new modules may switch whole files on a
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setting.
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- **Research 027:** the hooks that installed the AUR helper, enabled the login manager and changed
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shells are what the `package`, `service` and `user` shapes replace. Every remaining `sudo` in a module's
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own code is a debt to be named, starting with the agent module.
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jochen