self-hosting, provisioning and delivery efforts, and the dotfiles origin

The identity provider is settled as not-substrate: the mesh does not
require one, tier 2 authenticates natively, and it is a hosted service
like any other. Four substrate services, not five. The tier test's second
step gains the verb that matters — can the control plane START without it,
not function fully without it.

That verb answers the forge and the registries. They are not substrate and
they are not duplicated: the control plane starts and manages nodes
without a forge, it just cannot change itself. One gitea module, tier 4,
and the mesh's own instance is distinguished by what it is bound to rather
than by being a different module — the same answer as postgres, from the
same test. It also buys a property worth having: if the forge dies the
mesh keeps running.

Delivery needing them is not an upward dependency, resolved the way the
constitution already says to: tier 2 declares requirements, tier 4
provides implementations, the binding is data. The mechanism is
provisioning, and the new idea is that the control plane is itself a
consumer.

Self-hosting therefore becomes a state the mesh REACHES, not a
precondition. A first node comes up from pinned external artifacts and
re-binds to internal providers once they exist. Today's mesh assumes the
second state from the first moment, which is why the first-node path needs
a script that papers over an impossibility and is the least-exercised code
in the system. Made explicit, the transition is also reversible.

Research 007 and 008 opened for the two areas flagged as important and
complex, scoped from the weaknesses the as-is layer already documents
rather than started blank.

And the origin: this began as a dotfiles repository. The first two days
adopt dotfiles, add per-node overrides, and introduce service symlinking
with an ignore file. The flat one-directory-per-tool catalogue, linking
over copying, adoption of already-configured machines, per-node overrides
and the desktop modules are all inherited rather than chosen for a mesh.
That is the single most useful fact for anyone changing the catalogue, it
strengthens ADR 0018 — the case for links was never made for a mesh — and
it explains research 005's silent fifty: dotfiles-era entries for one tool
never shared a domain because they never had one.

01-RESEARCH/006-mesh-from-scratch/00-overview.md

@@ -40,6 +40,17 @@ look unsolvable from inside that frame:
 Designing from nothing is a way to find out which parts of the current shape are requirements
 and which are residue.
 
+**And there is more residue than expected, from a knowable source.** This began as a
+**dotfiles repository** — the first two days of history adopt dotfiles, add per-node dotfile
+overrides, and introduce service symlinking with an ignore file. The flat one-directory-per-tool
+catalogue, linking rather than copying, adoption of already-configured machines, per-node
+overrides, and the desktop modules are all inherited from that, not chosen for a mesh. Recorded
+in [`03-DESIGN/00-as-is/10-module-catalogue.md`](../../03-DESIGN/00-as-is/10-module-catalogue.md).
+
+That makes this effort's question sharper than "what would we do differently": much of what
+looks like design is a generalisation of *place files on my machines*, never revisited because
+it was never stated as an assumption.
+
 ## The requirements this is designed against
 
 Stated by the operator, recorded here so the skeleton can be checked against them rather than