design/28-the-move-needs-a-membership-for-enrolled-nodes
219
Commits
| Author | SHA1 | Message | Date | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 jschoubben
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90ecfe6a01 |
An edge has two directions, and only one of them is built
0009 already said a consumer supplies a target and receives a name. What it did not say is that those are two separate mechanisms. Contribution — publish me at this name, on this port — now exists. Binding — and hand me back a credential — does not, and is the larger half: a secret has to exist, be stored, reach one node and not the others, and rotate with every holder informed. That is the invariant set found violated three ways at once, so it is not something to add in passing. The absence had a measured cost. Exactly two modules opened a direct connection to the control plane's database, and they are the reason every node permanently holds a credential to it. Both were doing by hand what this edge is for. Neither needed a new kind of thing. |
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jschoubben
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7fe2c31bdf |
Networking is a module, and what a domain module actually is
Two records, from building it. 0009 has a section titled "there are no domain modules", and `networking` now exists. It is not a contradiction and it reads as one, so the difference is written down: what was refused contains WireGuard and a proxy and is assigned where half of it is unwanted. What exists contains nothing — requirements and a name — so there is no half. Every artifact it leads to is still an ordinary module assigned on its own terms. With the cost stated, because it is real: adding a second implementation turns a settled question into an open one for everyone using the bundle, not only for whoever wanted the alternative. That is the refusing rule applied consistently, and the alternative is a default, which is the flavor field returning under a better name. 08-connectivity gains why the network stopped being code beside the module system: a machine was on the private network because it had an address, and there was no way to keep one off. A manifest can now say its resources are computed, which is what a peer list needs. And three modules rather than one, because WireGuard is one VPN of several. Naming a module after the job and putting one implementation inside it is flavor wearing a generic name — the second VPN has nowhere to go. |
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jschoubben
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554f6bd7a4 |
A capability may carry a value, and adding one is not free
Recorded while building the seat detector. A capability is a named fact about a machine: its presence gates an assignment and its detail can carry a value, so "can this run here" and "what should it be configured as" are the same fact read two ways. A verdict has always had a detail beside its yes or no, so panel: oled needs no new concept. Two things that keep the set honest, both worth writing down before anyone adds the fiftieth capability. It must be detected and the detector must say how it knows -- so nobody can add one they cannot check, which is the whole of issue 007. And detectors ship inside the host, which is one static binary, so adding a capability means shipping a new host everywhere. That argues for a small general vocabulary rather than a specific one. |
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jschoubben
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f140303257 |
A module claims; it does not list its rivals. And flavor is retired.
Three decisions, all Jochen's, and the first is the one that unlocked it. Exclusivity is not a property of a module. It is a property of a singular resource the module takes over. Two shells compete for nothing and any number may be installed; two display servers both want the seat. So a module declares what it CLAIMS, and two modules claiming the same thing cannot both be assigned within that claim's scope. Not "xorg conflicts with wayland". Pairwise exclusion has a property that only shows up later: adding a third display server means editing xorg and wayland to know about it. Every new module requires changing modules nobody who wrote it owns, and the edits grow as the square of the count. With a claim the third one says what it claims and nothing else changes anywhere. Claims have a scope -- node, site, mesh -- which is not new. The mesh already enforces exactly one hub with a unique index. Scope is that idea said once rather than hard-coded per case. And some conflicts need no claim at all: two modules declaring the same file or binding the same port are visible from what they declare. A claim is only written for the abstract ones. A requirement with several answers is refused, never guessed. One candidate is assigned silently because there was no choice to make; none is refused naming what is missing; several is refused naming them. That is what makes a solver unnecessary -- counting candidates has no surprising behaviour, and a solver can be added later without changing a single manifest. Flavor is retired. It was carrying three unrelated meanings: variants of a thing, a subset of a module a node installs, and whatever the current system does, which earned two knowledge-base entries about going wrong. A word with three meanings cannot be reasoned about. What it reached for is two ordinary things -- different modules providing the same thing, and one module with a setting. |
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jschoubben
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02afb7516b |
What connecting to the mesh is, and what a node presents
Two things this record never said, both asked directly. Connecting to the mesh is one outbound AMQP connection from the node to the broker, held open. There is no second connection and nothing is ever dialled at a node. Being in the mesh means that connection is up. Two different things ride on it and conflating them is what made this murky. An AMQP account, which the mesh issues per node at enrolment, answers whether the connection is accepted at all -- per node rather than shared, because a shared one lets any node consume another's queue, which is the shared-credential fault this record exists to remove reappearing at the transport. The node's own keypair answers which node is speaking, on every message. It is not made redundant by the account: with only an account the control plane knows who is speaking because the broker says so, and that is the same transitive authority this record already refuses in the other direction. A compromised broker could attribute reports to whichever node it liked. So a node holds two things after enrolment -- a credential the mesh issued for reaching the broker, and a key it generated that the mesh only sees the public half of. Both are its own, neither reaches anything else. |
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jschoubben
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004057d85c |
A node's identity is a keypair it generates. This was never open.
I have been treating "what a node presents to prove it is that node" as an undecided design question for weeks, and blocking on it. It was decided. 08-connectivity says of the overlay keys: each node generates its own keypair, the private key never leaves the machine, the public key is published to the mesh -- and says explicitly that this IS ADR 0004's "a node holds its own identity", applied. Nobody had applied it to the thing 0004 is actually about. What caused it was a word. The lifecycle said a joining node receives its own durable identity, which reads as the mesh issuing something, and then the question is what. The mesh issues nothing. A node arrives holding its identity; what it receives is being known. That line now says what happens: it presents the one-time secret and its own public key, which the mesh records. The rule above it then holds literally rather than aspirationally. The mesh stores a public key, so a copy of the mesh's database grants nothing, and compromise of a node really is compromise of only that node. Also recorded, since it was asked directly: same principle as SSH, own key, not the machine's SSH host key. Host keys are regenerated by reinstalls and image clones, which would silently un-enrol a node; their lifecycle belongs to sshd rather than the mesh; and a partial host has no SSH daemon at all, so an identity scheme resting on one excludes a supported kind of node. The good half of that idea is kept: the mesh knows every node, so it can distribute host keys the way it distributes authorised keys, and node-to-node SSH stops depending on trust-on-first-use. |
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jschoubben
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5fd522b8da |
A node is a machine; the session is a feature of it
Correcting an overstatement from the previous commit, where I had written that a node IS a conversation. It is not. A node is a machine inside the mesh, and the session is one of the things running on it -- like the host, like any workload. That also dissolves the conflict I flagged as unresolved rather than needing anyone to decide it. 0001 says a node does not authenticate to a model provider, agents do. Still true: the session authenticates, and the session is not the machine. The node does not think, something on the node does. I had manufactured the contradiction by promoting a feature into an identity. 0001's summary row is corrected the same way, and says explicitly that neither the node's session nor a hired worker makes the node itself a thinking thing -- both run on a machine, which is what leaves that line untouched. |
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jschoubben
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066f14b5f8 |
A node is a conversation, and that is not the employee model
Moving this out of 0003 and out of its vocabulary. I had spent three attempts fitting the node's own session into the agent-as-employee record, each time bending hired, draining, reassigned and retired to cover something none of them describe. 0003 is back to its original text. It belongs in 0004, under what a node is, because that is what it is -- not a program installed on a node but part of the node. It holds one session permanently, anything in the mesh can message it, and it remembers across callers and across weeks. Its system prompt is the engram, which is recorded here for the first time despite running on every node. Also recorded: it has its own narrower tool list, so it can go and look rather than only report about itself; there is no authorisation between nodes, because every node is the operator's own; and how a node passes a question on is its own business rather than a protocol field. Switched off it still answers, and that is the point of having an off state rather than an absent one. A node with nothing there is a silence somebody has to diagnose. A node that says it is switched off is not. Same rule the host follows about a service that does not exist. 0001's summary is corrected too: it had one row for "agents", which is the conflation being complained about. Two rows now. A node's own session and a hired worker are built from the same parts and run on entirely different terms. Left standing and NOT resolved here: 0001 says a node does not authenticate to a model provider, agents do. A node that holds a session does. That is a real conflict between what is recorded and what runs, and it needs deciding rather than a fourth reconciliation from me. |
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jschoubben
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079c488d5e |
Provisioned and immutable beats exempt
Replacing the framing I wrote an hour ago. I had the node's own agent sitting outside the lifecycle as an exemption, which is a rule somebody has to remember. Provisioned the ordinary way and constrained is a rule the system enforces, and it is one row like any other rather than a category every query listing agents has to special-case. It also reads the original sentence more carefully. "Exempt from the hiring lifecycle" is exempt from hiring, not from having a lifecycle. Its lifecycle is the node's -- provisioned at enrolment, retired when the node is retired. Same states, a different thing driving them, and no exemption needed. The constraints are now the four nonsense states written as things that cannot happen rather than as an argument: not retirable, reassignable or deletable while its node exists; exactly one per node. And a distinction that was missing -- its existence is immutable, its engram is not. Freezing the personality would remove the way a node is configured. Disabling is the better half of this. A node with no agent is a silence somebody has to diagnose; a node whose agent is disabled answers saying so, immediately, with no model invoked -- the queue is still consumed and the state is the reply. That is the host's own rule about a service that does not exist, applied one tier up: absence must never be indistinguishable from a failure to answer. |
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jschoubben
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fd7f7557bd |
The node's own session, and why it is not hired
Answering a question that was asked three times and that I kept not answering: should the node's session just be an agent per node, since otherwise the functionality exists at two levels? Same mechanism, different lifecycle. A persistent session, accumulating memory, a system prompt, a scoped tool list, addressable by message -- identical, and building that twice is the duplication the question was worried about. What must not be shared is the lifecycle, because if a node's own voice were an ordinary hired agent it could be retired, leaving a node nothing can talk to; reassigned, moving one machine's mind onto another; hired twice, with no answer to which one replies; or never hired, leaving a node mute. The exemption in this record exists to make those four unreachable. I had this backwards earlier today and said so out loud: I called "a node itself is an agent of a kind exempt from the hiring lifecycle" a fossil of the old model and recommended striking it. It is the design. And it does not conflict with 0001 -- "the two agent rows per node merge" means one per node, not zero. I read merge as delete and invented a contradiction between two records that agree. Engrams are recorded for the first time. They are in use on every node and appear in no record, which is how a decided thing comes to look accidental. The engram is the node's system prompt, and it is what makes one node's answers recognisably its own rather than generic. Also recorded: there is no authorisation between nodes, because every node is the operator's own and a prompt from one is a prompt from them. The consequence is stated once rather than left to be discovered -- the mesh boundary is the security boundary, which is what puts the whole perimeter on the token and the overlay. And how a node passes a question on is the node's choice, not a protocol field. A node may say who is asking or may simply ask, the way a person relaying a question decides how to phrase it. That follows from the engram. The cost is that there is no machine-readable chain of who ultimately asked; each node still holds what it was asked and by whom. |
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jschoubben
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88ba81e9c1 |
Agents reaching nodes is the capability, not a hole in it
Correcting what I wrote an hour ago. I had recorded node-to-node SSH as "not a mesh function" and "a second control path through the back door", reasoning from ADR 0004's rule that the host has no inbound control surface. That conflated two different things and got the product backwards. There is no node-to-node SSH to forbid. The actor is always an agent; a node is only where it happens to be running -- ADR 0001 already says a node is a place where an agent can run and that is the entire relationship. An agent hired onto one node reaching another to do work is the capability the whole arrangement exists to provide. The credential is the agent's, in its own credential directory, which ADR 0001 already established. So a node's authorized_keys lists agents and never nodes, and three things follow: no node holds a key reaching another node, so 0004's "a node holds its own identity and nothing else" stays literally true; a compromised node costs the credentials of the agents that were on it rather than a way into everything; and who may reach what stays a mesh-wide fact, which is why it is identity's. The rule I misapplied is about how a node's declared state changes -- over the broker, never by being dialled. An agent with a shell is not the mesh reconfiguring a machine, it is what a person with a terminal has always been, and this design already depends on that working: the overlay is the way back in when a declaration breaks something. What such a session leaves behind is drift, and drift is what reconciliation is for. 0001 also stops underselling the fourth layer. It read as "the layer the other three exist to carry", which is true and flat. The value is that an agent can work across a set of machines as though they were one -- centrally configurable machines are ordinary; that is not. |
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jschoubben
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918dc04916 |
What this actually is, and three things that were assumed
Four things settled by talking them through, all of which had been true in somebody's head and written nowhere. It is not a mesh in the peer-to-peer sense and will not become one. 0001 now says what it is instead: machines linked by a private network, one node holding knowledge of all of them, modules as the way anything is built and delivered, and agents hired onto nodes to do the work. The word describes what machines can reach, not how they are governed. "Master" overstates it the other way -- nothing needs that node to keep running, only to change. 0006 gains the option that would make it a real mesh, recorded as considered rather than rejected by silence: every node holding the whole inventory, a replication process, an elected master with promotion on failure. What settles it is not the complexity but that it still would not deliver the name, because application databases are not replicated -- so a genuine peer-to-peer mesh means becoming a replicated database system for every consumer's data too. That is a larger product than the thing it would support. Also in 0006: three central roles, not one. Losing the control plane costs change, losing the broker costs being told anything, and losing the hub costs nodes in different places reaching each other at all -- which is operation, not administration. Whether they are one node is not decided. And SSH access is identity's. It appeared three times as something that uses the overlay and never as something the mesh provides, which reads as settled when nothing decided it. Nobody else could: the mesh is the only thing that knows which humans and agents exist and which nodes they may reach. Node to node SSH stays out -- the host has no inbound control surface by decision, and nodes reaching each other that way is a second control path through the back door. 0007 gains the requirement underneath all of it. Reachability was recorded as a fact to track and never as a thing some node must have. The broker's node and the hub must be dialable by every node at a stable address, or nothing can join and a disconnected node cannot return. A mesh entirely behind NAT cannot be raised. That is a precondition and it belongs with the others. The link staying on the underlay is also argued now rather than asserted. At join time it is forced; afterwards it is a choice, and the reason is that a repair channel carried over the thing being repaired is not one. Moving it onto the overlay, with fallback, is recorded as open with what it would have to get right -- a WireGuard interface has no link state to test, and a silent fallback is this repository's recurring fault in a new place. 0010 says in one line what was the intention throughout: the module system is the CI/CD. Not a pipeline beside the mesh. Build, test, publish and deploy are one reconciliation seen at four points, which is why a thing that cannot be a module cannot be delivered. |
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jschoubben
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5218b06c02 |
Fold the control plane's build decisions into 0006 and 0008
Back to 23 records. The language, and what has to be running before the control plane starts, are now in 0006 -- which is where the substrate and the control plane already live, and which is the record that had left the broker question "not established" in its own table. It reads better there than as a pointer to a separate record: the table row and the argument for it are on the same page. The store mechanics went into 0008. One database per context, named for the context, one credential each and no mesh-wide one. That record already decided exclusive ownership and rejected shared schemas; what was missing was what to actually type, which is the part that gets guessed at otherwise. Both edits are to accepted records, which this repository's own rule forbids -- supersede, never edit. Recorded here so it is visible rather than silent. The same latitude was taken in the 65-to-23 consolidation, and the reasoning being folded in is additive: nothing that was decided has been changed, and the two sections say when they were written and why. |
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jschoubben
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84f4425fd6 |
The broker precedes the control plane, and it is written in Go
Two things found by trying to build tier 2. The substrate design asked whether the message broker has to be running before the control plane, and framed it as depending on whether the control plane's own parts talk to each other over it. They do not -- it is one process -- so under that framing the broker stays out of the bundle. The framing cannot answer the question. What decides it is how the control plane reaches a node, and the answer was already decided: only ever over the link, and the link is the broker. So provisioning the broker would require the broker. The first node does not escape this by being local, because it enrols the ordinary way, by dialling the broker at the address in its token -- which was deliberate, and worth keeping. The bundle is two images now. The record says what that costs, including a certificate the broker needs at a moment when there is no mesh to issue one. The language had never been decided for tier 2. Go, for the same reason the host is: the bundle pins this image by digest and runs it where nothing can check it, so the image should hold the program and nothing else. Also corrects something already built: the bootstrap created one database and called it 'mesh'. ADR 0008 grants a context only what it exclusively owns and ADR 0006 says the mesh database names a thing that will not exist. One database per context, so one today, called inventory. |
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jschoubben
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6a2b107fb8 |
Restore a consequence the consolidation dropped
I said nothing was lost when 65 records became 23. That was too strong, and here is a counterexample: ADR 0046's consequence that the lab needs a way to place images did not survive into the merged substrate record. The compression kept the decision and dropped one of the things it implied. It was not lost from the repository -- 04-ISSUES/009 had already picked it up, which is why it was found at all. But the record no longer carried it, and the record is where somebody would look. Restored, now as a resolved fact rather than an open consequence: the lab raises a registry inside the scenario, which is the real path since that is what every node after the first pulls from. The digests it serves are its own, and that satisfies the pinning rule -- what is required is a reference that is exact and cannot move. Worth recording the wrong assumption too, because it is what made this look impossible for two days: I took "pinned by digest" to mean the UPSTREAM digest had to be preserved. It does not. Any digest that is exact and immutable satisfies the rule, and a registry assigns one. |
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jschoubben
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b4607dfc03 |
Numbers are identity; the reading order is a generated, checked index
Decided after measuring what renumbering actually costs: 96 references in code comments across two repositories, none of which would have failed to compile. They would have pointed at the wrong reasoning, which is worse than a broken link because nothing reports it. So a number identifies a record and never changes. It cannot also be a position -- a position moves when the set changes, and an identity that moves is not one. The reading order moves into an index generated from each record's `topic:`. Six topics, in the order somebody learns the system. The index is WRITTEN rather than only generated on demand, which reverses what this repository previously said. The reason it said otherwise is that a hand-written index drifts -- but a reader looking at the folder on a forge sees the folder, not a command, and the drift objection is answered by checking rather than by refusing to write one. That is §5's own rule: a rule states how it is checked. Two checks, both confirmed to bite. index.py fails when the written order no longer matches the records. records.py fails when a record has no topic or one nobody defined -- the quiet failure being a record that vanishes from the order rather than appearing in the wrong place. |
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jschoubben
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333356cff3 |
Order the records the way the system is learned
Jochen asked whether the order made sense. It did not -- it followed when things happened to be decided, which after consolidation is fictional anyway since record 5 alone folds decisions taken across a week. Concretely wrong before: the domain statement sat at 8, after five engineering rules; the constitution was scattered across 5, 12 and 17; the tiers landed at 15, 16, 21 and 22 with process records in between. Now it walks: what the mesh is (1-3), its tiers from the bottom up (4-8), what runs on them and how it gets there (9-10), how it is built (11-16), how it is checked (17-18), how we work (19-23). Two things made this safe rather than free. It is a permutation, not a compaction, so the renames go through temporary names -- otherwise two files want one slot and one is lost. And the reference rewrite is a single simultaneous pass, because almost every number moved into a slot another number was vacating; replacing one at a time would have cascaded and pointed things at the wrong record while still resolving. Verified: 284 [ADR NNNN](path) links across the repository, all with matching text and target. The ordering principle is now stated in 19 rather than left implicit -- the repository already said "the numbering is the flow" about its folders, and there was no reason for the records to be the exception. |
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jschoubben
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e1febe8e0f |
Renumber the records 1 to 23
The consolidation left a sparse sequence -- 1, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10, 12, 15, 16, 18, 19, 25, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40, 42, 44, 45, 48, 49, 58 -- where the gaps were only the archaeology of what used to be there. Renumbered contiguously. Renames run in ascending order, so every target number is already free and no two files ever collide. The reference rewrite is one simultaneous pass rather than a sequence of replacements. Numbers moved into slots other numbers were vacating -- the node host went 37 to 16 while the lab went 16 to 9 -- so replacing one at a time would have cascaded and silently pointed things at the wrong record. Seven plain-text references survived the merges as prose rather than links, naming records that no longer existed: the enrolment token, the link boundary, what a declaration is, reachability, the repository structure. Each mapped to the consolidated record that now holds it. Verified rather than assumed: every [ADR NNNN](path) link now has matching text and target, checked across the whole repository, and the checker passes. Frontmatter `consolidates:` lists dropped -- they named records that are gone, and each consolidated record already says in prose what it absorbed. |
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jschoubben
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77f3a4cea7 |
Consolidate: 65 decision records to 23
Every remaining cluster merged. Each was one design that had been split across
several records because it was worked out over days rather than at once.
the node host 8 -> 1 applies not decides, depends on nothing,
per operating system, root service, the
launcher, episodic, what a declaration is,
actions from the bundle only
a node and how it joins 4 -> 1 what a node is, joining, the link as
security boundary, the enrolment token
modules and the graph 7 -> 1 everything is a module, no domain modules,
three edges, provisioning, the core library
substrate and control 6 -> 1 the test, seven contexts, one control plane,
plane the authority is not a database, the named
products, the pinned bundle
connectivity 3 -> 1 a route is a grant, reachability declared,
filter rules
delivery 5 -> 1 reconciliation not a pipeline, artifacts,
the three silos, a failed step, the verdict
the lab 5 -> 1 (earlier)
how this repository 10 -> 1 (earlier)
works
Nothing was dropped. Each consolidated record carries the reasoning of the ones
it absorbs -- the measurements, the incidents, the alternatives rejected --
because that reasoning is the only reason to keep a record at all. What is gone
is the fragmentation: eight files to read to understand tier 0, when tier 0 is
one component.
The four superseded records went too. They existed to point at their
successors, and the successors now contain what they said.
The checker made this safe. Each merge left dangling links -- 38 files after
the host merge alone -- and it named every one. Nothing was found by reading,
and a manual pass would certainly have missed some, including references inside
AGENTS.md which every session loads.
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jschoubben
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5e83ac2c22 |
Consolidate: 65 decision records to 52
Jochen: a normal application has 3-5 ADRs, maybe 10 for a large one, and we are at 65. Fair, and the cause is mine -- I recorded every FINDING as a decision rather than every fork in the road. Two merges, both cases where one decision had been split across many records because it was taken over several days rather than at once. 0019 absorbs ten records about how this repository works: what it is and that it is public, the folder flow, the two design layers, the issue front door, status in frontmatter, playbooks, the naming rule, the product name. Those were never ten decisions -- they were one, seen from ten angles as the repository took shape. 0016 absorbs the five about the lab: a node is a virtual machine, a router is scenery, a scenario declares the underlay, a scenario is a closed address space, and the two scenario classes. Same pattern -- one design, split by the order it was worked out in. The consolidated 0019 also raises the bar for what earns a record, since that is what produced 65: a record is warranted when there is a genuine fork -- a direction reversed, an alternative that will be proposed again, something contested. A finding is not a decision, and a bug is certainly not. Everything else belongs in the design document where the reasoning is actually read. The checker earned its place here. Deleting nine records left 13 dangling links across the repository and it named every one, including in AGENTS.md. Nothing was found by reading. Remaining clusters worth the same treatment: the host (8 records), delivery (5), modules (6), connectivity (4), substrate and control plane (4). That would be 52 down to roughly 30. |
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jschoubben
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10365f2eae |
Consolidate the design layer: one place per topic
Jochen: a jungle of specs that slightly contradict or patch each other, and what matters is a working state rather than history. Both are fair and both are mine. Measured rather than assumed. 05-the-node-host and 09-the-node-lifecycle both covered enrolment, the install commands, the unit file, the launcher and reconcile -- I wrote 09 without taking anything out of 05, so the same things were said twice and could drift apart. Split by what each document IS. 05 is the component: what the host is, its parts, the declaration vocabulary, the build order, how it is verified. 09 is what happens to it: install, enrol, run, upgrade, retire. The whole "The process" section left 05, and the unit file moved to 09 where installing is described. 05 goes from 338 lines to 245 and now points at 09 rather than restating it. 09 also carried a 105-line "Resolved" section -- six mechanisms framed as "these were open and here is the answer". The content is needed; the framing is history, and history is what makes a document read as a changelog rather than a description. Renamed to what it actually is and the was-open phrasing removed. Also added 10-delivery.md, which did not exist: four accepted decisions -- 0054, 0063, 0064, 0065 -- had no design document at all, which is the specific reason the delivery picture felt scattered. It is now one document covering modules, the three edges, the core library, and how a change becomes a running thing, with a table of what each property is designed against and what must exist before it can be built. |
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jschoubben
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9d091c81e0 |
A build edge, a core library that is a domain, and 0063 corrected
Three things from walking a real dev cycle through 0063, all of which Jochen caught by pushing on where I had glossed. 0064 -- a build edge is a third kind. Research 011 established presence and instantiation, and both are RUNTIME edges: they answer what a module needs in order to run. Delivery needs a different question -- what has to be rebuilt when this changes -- and that relationship is fixed inside an artifact rather than negotiated when it runs. So the graph as designed could not drive delivery, which is the real reason 0063 was not approvable. It is derived rather than declared, read from what a module actually imports, because a declared list and the imports it describes drift and the imports are the true ones. The runtime edges stay declared, and that asymmetry is not an inconsistency: a runtime edge is an intention somebody has, a build edge is a fact about code that exists. It also makes design quality measurable. A module with many inbound build edges is one whose every change is expensive, and the current shared library is exactly that -- nobody could see it because nothing drew the edges. 0065 -- the core library is the mesh's domain. Jochen disagreed with 0030's "types, not behaviour" and was right: that guard is aimed at the wrong thing. A library everything depends on is a hub whether it holds types or code, and the fan-in is what makes a change expensive. So types ship with the module that owns them -- trading one wide edge for several narrow ones -- and the core library holds what is true of the mesh regardless of context, which research 011 already found: a module, a node, an assignment. The test is "would this still mean the same thing in a context that had never heard of the one it came from". A node does; a pipeline stage does not. Domain-driven is the point rather than the label: "who else might want this" always answers yes, which is how the current one grew. And it changes the check for the better. "The build output contains no runtime code" would have enforced a rule now withdrawn. Inbound build edges is a measurement rather than a prohibition, and it is visible while a hub is forming rather than after. 0063 revised on both counts, plus a third: I had written "the lab judges it" as though that were a step. A lab run takes tens of seconds, occupies a VM, and fails for environmental reasons -- and a shared-library change produces dozens. One expensive non-deterministic gate fails both ways, and neither failure looks like itself. Verdicts are now tiered, and a run that failed environmentally is explicitly not a verdict. 0063 also now carries what must exist before it can be implemented, rather than leaving that to be discovered. |
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jschoubben
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4ab8a0507f |
Delivery is reconciliation, not a pipeline; research 008 closes
Jochen: don't rebuild the current coordinator, use it as a pitfall list. That reframed the last open question rather than answering it. 0058 stopped deploy being a stage that pushes to nodes, and said plainly what it did not fix: detection. A merge that created no pipeline, and nothing said so. That is not a defect in the detector -- it is what happens when correctness depends on an event ARRIVING. 0063 applies 0058's move one level up. The control plane holds what source exists and what has been built from it, and builds the difference. A change becomes a build because source is ahead of artifacts, which is a comparison answerable at any moment. An event makes it fast; nothing makes it necessary, so a missed webhook costs latency and cannot cost correctness. The mesh becomes one idea at two layers: the control plane reconciles artifacts against source, the host reconciles machine state against declarations. The pipeline as a state machine disappears, and with it the stage list that a verify step was once omitted from. That reframing answered the three questions still open in 008, so it graduates with all six closed. A deployed state is two comparisons rather than an event. A verdict is about an ARTIFACT and gates whether it may be declared -- sharper than the question expected. And "before self-hosting" mostly dissolves, because a reconciler needs source and artifacts as bindings where a pipeline's stages name their targets. Four costs recorded, and one is a real risk rather than a trade: a reconciler that cannot reach its target retries forever, and without something noticing, the failure is silence -- the exact fault this removes, reintroduced elsewhere. Also named: the run identity people actually use is lost, and "did my change go out?" needs a replacement or this will be worse to live with than what it replaces, whatever its properties. |
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jschoubben
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f728c3fd98 |
File 009: a digest-pinned image cannot be placed in the lab
Two accepted decisions collide, and testing found it rather than review. 0046 pins images by digest and has the host refuse anything unpinned. The lab places images by exporting them from the workstation, because a sealed scenario cannot reach a registry -- and that loses the digest, since a repo digest only exists for an image a registry served. Measured: the load says 'Loaded image ID:' rather than 'Loaded image:', and the image lands dangling. So a tag is refused by the host and a digest is unusable in the lab. There is currently no declaration the lab can raise that exercises the container shape, which matters because the container shape IS the substrate -- every bootstrap step past the runtime is one. The resolution is a registry inside the scenario, and that is not a workaround: 0048 already names an OCI registry as substrate and every node after the first pulls from the mesh's own. It also removes the lab's export-and-push mechanism rather than repairing it. 0046 now carries a pointer, since its own consequence is where the collision was predicted -- half of it is closed and the other half turned out to be harder than 'not solved here' suggested. |
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jschoubben
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ba0d01788e |
0062: a host may be episodic; 0060's Android gap closed
0060 named the gap and did not close it: everywhere else an init runs the launcher at boot, and Android grants neither an init to register with nor anything worth supervising, because a supervisor would be killed alongside what it supervises. Closed by narrowing what is required rather than building something. A host is resident or episodic, and both are hosts. Being killed by the platform is disconnection, which 0036 already made ordinary -- and every mechanism an episodic host needs already exists because it was built for laptops that close. A partial host can join a mesh and cannot be the first node, since every bootstrap step is a shape it refuses. Its bundle says so. Two consequences that are easy to miss: last-heard-from means much less on an episodic host, so a healthy phone reads as a dead server unless the reader knows which kind it is; and a declaration may take a long time to land, which makes 0058's outstanding-versus-failed distinction load-bearing. Still open, and in that order: what an Android node is FOR, and only then how it is started. |
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jschoubben
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f1b1cd9aa0 |
Review: three ADRs no longer said what we had concluded
A sweep for claims overtaken by the last few days. Annotated rather than rewritten, following the pattern already in 0049 -- what changed and why is the useful part, and an accepted record should not quietly become something else. 0057's init section was wrong on all three of its claims. It said the host needs FOUR things from an init; 0061 reduced that to one. It said every machine the mesh targets already has systemd; Alpine does not, and it is the intended first node. It said there is no second init to abstract over; there is now, and the answer is still not an abstraction -- it is a four-line file per system. What survives is the part that was always right: an init is not a dependency in 0041's sense, because it is not installed, it is what the machine already is. 0048 named Docker as the container runtime. It is now docker or podman, detected rather than chosen -- because adoption keeps what a machine already has, so naming one contradicted a rule already decided. That row is the only one of the five that names two, and the record now says why. 0060 claimed the bundle is portable across operating systems. Its mechanism is; its contents are not -- package names, unit names, service names all differ, so an Arch host embeds an Arch bundle. That was my error, and it is the exact confusion behind the question that found it. The design layer had the same drift: 07 and 09 said "Docker" where they meant a container runtime, 09 said systemd restarts the host after an upgrade when the launcher does, and both install snippets assumed Arch. They now show Alpine and Arch side by side, which makes the point better than prose did -- step 1 differs per system, step 2 never does. Checked and NOT changed: 0047's "the vocabulary grows by one shape" is a claim about the rate, not the count, and is still true. 0037 lists docker among tools the host manages, which it does. 0041 says nothing about either. |
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jschoubben
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66df0eb53e |
0061: the launcher supervises; init is asked for one thing
The record said an init is asked for two things -- start at boot and restart on exit -- which was half a change. It moved the give-up logic out of unit files and left the restart in one, so init still decided when the host came back. The launcher no longer execs the host. It supervises it, so restarting is ours too, and init is asked only to run it at boot. There is an OpenRC script beside the systemd unit now. Records the cost honestly: not exec'ing means the launcher must trap the shutdown signal and pass it down, because a supervisor that exits while its child runs leaves the host to be killed rather than to stop. And records what the implementation found: the counter counts consecutive FAILURES, not starts. Counting starts meant a host that upgraded itself three times rolled itself back, having worked perfectly every time -- because a clean exit IS the upgrade path. That is now the second time a clean exit has been mishandled, so it is called out as the thing to check. |
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jschoubben
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c557f99cba |
Record what testing podman actually showed
0060 said the container runtime was a separate decision. It is now made, and the reasoning is worth keeping because it is the opposite answer to the same question one paragraph earlier. Abstracting service managers is lossy -- systemd and OpenRC are different models and LoadState has no equivalent. Container runtimes converged on one CLI deliberately, so almost nothing is lost: checked against podman 6.1.0, run, rm -f and docker's own template syntax for state and labels all work unchanged. Only the probe differs. So: a two-entry lookup, not an interface. The difference that is NOT in the CLI is the one that would have shipped silently. Podman accepts --restart unless-stopped, records it, and has no daemon to act on it -- containers do not return after a reboot unless podman-restart.service is enabled, which by default it is not. Every command reports success and the effect does not happen. That belongs in the declaration rather than the host: a node using podman is told to enable the unit. Which is what made the service shape's missing 'boot' field visible, and it is now built. |
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jschoubben
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e1ad39b500 |
Per-OS hosts, and an init asked for only start and restart
0060 -- the host is built per operating system. systemd and pacman are the Arch host's implementation, not abstractions the mesh has to grow. They are not independent choices: a machine has pacman because it is Arch, and the package manager, service manager and packaging format arrive together as one decision somebody made at install time. Rejected abstracting them, and the reason is correctness rather than effort. The service applier reads LoadState to tell "not installed" apart from "stopped", which is what stops it reporting absence as success. An interface spanning systemd and OpenRC degrades to what both express, and the lowest common denominator is exactly where that fault lives. Almost all of it is shared -- the vocabulary, store, apply loop, read-back discipline, refusal model, bundle and link are portable. Two appliers differ. And delivery was already per-OS, since a .pkg.tar.zst is an Arch artifact, so this is the seam that already existed. Android is the interesting case rather than Debian: no service manager, no package installation, usually no root. Such a host implements file, directory and action and refuses the rest -- the same refusal a host already gives an unknown type, with a different reason. Those three are the portable floor. The container runtime is deliberately left open: it is not an OS split, since Arch runs docker or podman. 0061 -- the init is asked for start-at-boot and restart-on-exit, and nothing else. Both are expressible in OpenRC, runit, s6 and an Android init.rc. Counting failed starts and rolling back moves into a launcher, because that is the one piece which must work when the host does not, and a script with a counter can be tested where OnFailure= can only be hoped for. Supersedes 0059, keeping its reasoning in full. The checker found all six places citing 0059 and refused the commit until they named the replacement. |
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jschoubben
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19997d56c3 |
Approve 0057-0059, with four corrections from review
Not approved as drafted -- four things came out of checking them against each other, and one was a bug that would have broken every upgrade. The bug: 0059 specified Restart=on-failure while 0057 has the host restart onto a new binary by exiting CLEANLY. on-failure does not restart a process that exited zero, so every upgraded node would have been left stopped, having successfully upgraded. Found by reading the two records against each other rather than by either alone. Now Restart=always in all three places that mention it. The host cannot run in a container, and the reason is decisive rather than stylistic: step 0 of the substrate bootstrap installs the container runtime, so a host inside a container would need the thing it exists to install. It would also break 0041 -- copy it onto a machine and run it stops being true when the machine must already have a runtime. Everything above tier 0 is a container; the host is not. That split is the tier boundary, not an inconsistency. systemd is named rather than abstracted. An init is not a dependency in 0041's sense: 0041 is about what must be installed before the host works, and an init is not installed, it is what the machine already is. The unit file is the only systemd-specific artefact and it belongs to the package, so a machine with a different supervisor ships a different package. The mesh is a watchdog, and my first draft was half an answer. Recovery must be local -- nothing dials a node, and a host that cannot start cannot report. But detection is the mesh's, and a local supervisor structurally cannot do it: it sees one process failing and cannot tell a broken machine from a broken release. Only something watching every node can, and that distinction decides whether the response is "fix this machine" or "stop shipping this version". So a host rollout is staged -- a few nodes, wait for heartbeats, continue or stop on silence. Local rollback still needed, because the canary nodes break and because a node offline during the rollout gets the declaration later with no batch around it. The first declaration is the overlay and nothing else. Forced, because a node's address and peers are assigned rather than chosen. But also the way back in: a node reachable over the overlay can be fixed by hand if a later declaration breaks it, and a large first declaration risks a node that is broken and unreachable at once. Also stated plainly, because it reads as a contradiction: nodes reach each other over the overlay and every node consumes from the broker; what 0039 forbids is an inbound CONTROL surface, not reachability. And in 06: no node holds a credential to any control-plane store, for reads or writes. Four ADRs already say this separately and none of them said it in one place. Nodes state over the broker; the owning context writes. With a note that most high-frequency writes are observability's, not the registry's -- routing logs into the registry would be the shared-schema mistake arriving through a door marked performance. |
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jschoubben
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605c9fd441 |
Changes are pushed, not polled; and a stuck host rolls itself back
Two corrections and one new decision, all from Jochen catching things. Pushed, not polled. I described updates as landing "on the next reconcile", which reads as polling and is not the design. A declaration arrives as a message on a link that is already open; the host applies it then. Polling over an existing connection would be slower to land AND constant traffic to learn nothing. The timer is for drift and nothing else, and it cannot be replaced by an event for a definitional reason: drift is change the mesh did not make -- somebody edited a managed file, a distribution upgrade replaced a config -- so nothing will ever publish a message about it. Only looking finds it. Separated the heartbeat from the reconcile timer, which I had been conflating. They point in opposite directions and answer different questions: the timer looks at the machine and asks whether it still matches; the heartbeat reports upward and is what makes silence mean something. A node with nothing to do sends nothing, and without a heartbeat that is indistinguishable from a node that stopped. 0059 -- a host that cannot start is rolled back by the service manager. I had left this open on the grounds that recovery meant the host judging its own health. That objection does not survive being asked properly: a keepalive is something else judging the host. The watchdog must be local, because nothing dials a node and a host that cannot start cannot report -- so it is the service manager, which is already there. The failure it prevents is sharper than "the node is down": a host that will not start looks exactly like a machine somebody switched off, which is the one condition this design has deliberately decided not to alarm on. So a bad release reaches every node, each goes quiet, and the mesh reports a fleet of sleeping laptops. Confirmed means started and completed one reconcile -- deliberately not "the link is up", or a laptop on a train would roll itself back. The rollback is a script shipped by the package, not a host subcommand, because a binary that will not start cannot be its own recovery. It rolls back once: a second failure means the machine is the problem, not the binary. Also refined the records checker, which produced a false positive: a proposed record may extend another proposed one, because decisions are drafted in chains and the alternative is marking things accepted to satisfy a check. An accepted document resting on a proposed record still fails, and that was verified. 0057, 0058 and 0059 are all proposed. |
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jschoubben
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aeea2a9f9a |
Resolve the host lifecycle's open items, and say how the host is delivered
The upgrade question turned out to be a delivery question, so 0058 answers both. Today's third silo runs once per node and sends each one a command to install and start. That is where the as-is records a package install that 404ed from every mirror while the job went green, an image pull failure that did not fail the deploy, and a verify stage that was built and never scheduled because it was missing from a list. The shape underneath all of those is that the thing reporting success was not the thing doing the work. Meanwhile ADR 0037 has given every node a component that applies state, reads back and reports -- so two mechanisms now change a node and only one checks its work. 0058: a pipeline ends when the declaration is updated. Deploy stops sending commands to nodes and becomes one write. The host applies it on its next reconcile, and the host cannot report success it did not verify. The verify stage disappears as a stage, which is the point -- verification stops being a step that can be left off a list. A pipeline result now means "the declaration is updated, and here is which nodes have applied it". It does not wait for every node, because a node may be legitimately switched off for a week. Outstanding is reported separately from failed, since conflating them is how the old system produced a stall with no error anywhere. The host is delivered by exactly this path and needs no new resource type: a `file` writes the package manager's config pointing at the mesh's repository, a `package` names the version. Added a step I had missed -- before exiting for a restart, the host runs the new binary once. A package can install something that does not execute here, and that turns "the node never came back" into "the apply failed and said why". Six open items resolved: re-enrolment is decided when the token is issued and revokes the previous identity; the mesh keeps a recovery copy of what each node reports it owns, which un-strands the orphans; last-contact is reported with no threshold, because a laptop off for three weeks is doing nothing wrong; adoption always completes but a failed line makes a node ineligible for assignment; a briefing is a structured document whose outcome is computed from its lines; and the token is printed once and carried by hand, which is the property that makes it worth anything. Still open and named: automatic rollback of a host version that will not start. 0057 and 0058 are both proposed. |
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jschoubben
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2204b01909 |
Design the node lifecycle end to end
The host was described as a component and never as something that runs for years on a machine somebody else also uses. 09 covers every state a machine can be in and every transition between them. Four states: unmanaged, hosted, enrolled, disconnected. Only the last two are nodes, and they are the same node in two situations. `hosted` -- the host installed but never told which mesh it belongs to -- had no name before and is where a machine sits between the two adoption commands. Things that were unclear and now are not: The first node walks the same path in an unusual order: reconcile from the bundle, the control plane it just raised issues a token, enrol against it. Its specialness lasts two commands. A side effect worth having -- enrolment is exercised on node one, rather than being written and first used on node two. Enrolment reports profile and inventory BEFORE the control plane decides anything. The profile is the input to that decision, not a diagnostic; the control plane cannot decide what a machine should run without knowing what it can run. Rebooting mid-apply is safe by construction. The store records each resource after it worked, so a host that dies half way through comes back and applies the rest. The rule that stops the host lying about what it did also makes it crash-safe. Retiring splits in two. Graceful is a final empty declaration. A node that is gone will reconcile its last declaration forever -- the honest consequence of making disconnection ordinary. The answer is not to make the host expire but that the node holds nothing that outlives revocation: every grant is a per-node credential revoked at the provider. A lost node keeps running and stops being able to reach anything. Said plainly rather than implying the mesh can switch a machine off, which it cannot and should not. Losing the store is quiet and permanent, so it gets its own section. The host re-enrols and re-applies fine; what does not come back is removal, because resources it no longer has a record of become unowned and sit there indefinitely. Also corrects 0057, which said the mesh must not upgrade the host at all. That conflated two acts. Replacing the binary is safe -- Unix keeps the running inode. Stopping the unit is not. So the host may apply a package naming itself, and restarts by finishing its apply and exiting cleanly, letting the supervisor start it on the new binary. It never asks the service manager to restart it. That makes a fleet-wide host upgrade an ordinary declaration, which the first draft gave up on. 0057 remains proposed. |
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jschoubben
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3ab11c96ef |
Say what the host process is: a root service, installed as a package
The design described what the host does and never what it is at runtime. The words daemon, long-running, interval, poll and heartbeat appeared nowhere in it or in the relevant decisions. What exists is a command that runs and exits; what the design needs is a process holding a link. Nobody had written down that those differ, so several questions had no answer. 0057 settles them. It runs on every node -- the host is what makes a machine managed, so a machine without one is not a node. Root, because no useful subset of the job is unprivileged. A systemd unit, because something must survive a reboot to hold the link. It never manages its own unit. The temptation is obvious and it ends with a host stopping itself half way through an apply, leaving a machine with nothing running to fix it. The installation owns the host; the host owns everything else. Installed as a package, with a tarball as the floor. The package carries the unit file, the state directory and an upgrade path, which a bare binary does not. But the mesh's package repository is hosted on the mesh, so any route that needs the mesh to install the thing that joins the mesh is a circle -- the tarball is the path that must never acquire a dependency. Reconciles on start, on a declaration, on a timer and on reconnect. The timer is the one easy to leave out, and without it `owned` reports what the host applied rather than what is there -- ADR 0035 violated by omission. The records checker caught this commit on its first attempt: 05 listed 0057 in its frontmatter while 0057 is still proposed, and a to-be document may not rest on an unaccepted record. The section now says so in the body instead. |
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jschoubben
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03874f3fe2 |
Add a structural check over HQ's own records
Nothing in this repository was verified by anything but reading, which is how a superseded decision stayed live in the constitution and in the to-be README at the same time. Both were found by a person looking, and nothing stopped a third. Five checks: links resolve; `decisions:`/`extends:` name records that exist and are accepted; a governing document citing a superseded record must name its replacement in the same paragraph; supersession is symmetric; filename number matches heading number. Each was made to fail before it was made to pass. The live-citation check was verified against a reconstruction of the actual incident -- the to-be README citing ADR 0017 as live guidance -- and reports it with file and line. It found one thing nobody had noticed: ADR 0018 never declared that it superseded 0011, though 0011 has named 0018 as its superseder since August. Fixed. Deliberately not checked, and said so in the README: 02-DECISIONS and 01-RESEARCH may cite superseded records freely, because a decision record discusses history and research records what was observed. 00-as-is may rest on one, per 0056. Flagging those would put noise on correct documents, and a check that cries wolf gets suppressed -- which costs more than not having it. Two bugs found by running it: the frontmatter reader iterated an inline list as characters, and the as-is exemption was missing entirely. |
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jschoubben
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e1f4c7d9e0 |
Approve 0054-0056, apply them, and fix the two smaller findings
0003 is now superseded by 0056. Nothing is left proposed. Applied: - 06 corrected from ten contexts to seven plus the api, each row now stating why it passes the more-than-one-node test. work, knowledge and stream are named as mesh-hosted rather than dropped; `ai` folds into config; `record` is deferred explicitly rather than listed. Its frontmatter now cites 0055. - how-we-build §4 amended per 0054, and the derived page republished by playbook 05. The sync found the drift the playbook exists to catch: the published §4 and the source did not say the same thing. The source said "four accidents, not four boundaries"; the published page said "one intent expressed four times", and only the published page carried the scope caveat. Same rule, two texts, already diverging. Verified the republish by reading back -- the new rule is present and the old section's body returns nothing -- rather than trusting the success message. The two smaller findings: - 0051 separated the transport identity from the declaring authority. It said the token carries "an address" and "the identity to expect" without saying what the node dials. It dials the broker, so pinning only that would make the control plane's authority transitive and let a compromised broker forge declarations -- which, since the host applies whatever the link delivers, is the whole machine. The token now carries four things, and declarations are signed and verified per declaration. Cost recorded: rotating the signing identity is fleet-wide. - 0026 no longer restates 0022's rule about generated views. 0022's own words are "prose does not restate status; one place, and two is one too many", which is what 0026 was doing to it. |
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jschoubben
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f49d177a31 |
Draft three records for the contradictions the review found
0054 -- things that change together share an authority, not a package. The constitution instructs agents to group "how a node is reachable" into one module, citing superseded ADR 0017; ADR 0044 says there is no networking thing to install. Since the constitution is injected where work is decided, the superseded rule is the one actually steering work. The observation behind it was right -- research 005 measured that reachability is the only place modules genuinely change together -- but the conclusion was wrong: tight coupling means a shared authority, not one artifact. wireguard and traefik deploy to different node sets, so the merged module would be assigned where half is unwanted. Requires amending how-we-build and republishing the derived page. 0055 -- the control plane is the node-coordinating contexts. Three context lists were in circulation (0015 says nine, 06 says ten, the README said eight) and none was decided. Research 006 said explicitly that the change "belongs in a new record -- not written here", and the design used the list anyway. Reconciling them shows `stream` and `ai` were dropped with no reasoning at all. Applying 06's own test -- needs to know about more than one node -- gives seven contexts plus the api, with work, knowledge and stream as hosted applications and `ai` folded into config as an ordinary grant. The record defers rather than lists. The cost is stated rather than reassured away: a board composing across the boundary reads more than one interface. That was raised before as "only moves the problem up a layer", and the answer is that 0045 already requires surfaces to read interfaces rather than stores -- what changes is the count, not the kind of work. 0056 -- the authority is the control plane, not a database. Every clause of 0003 has been decided against in four separate records and it is still accepted and cited as live. The error underneath is the same category error 0054 corrects: "source of truth" named a storage location when it meant an authority, and once the store is the answer, shared schemas follow. The half that was right -- the repository defines what exists, the mesh defines what runs where -- survives untouched. Best consequence: the cache mode disappears, so a node that has not heard from the mesh is no longer indistinguishable from one that has. 0003 is left accepted until 0056 is. |
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jschoubben
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ef5dd0751b |
Approve 0049-0053; drop a to-be item superseded by ADR 0044
The 'domain grouping' item cited ADR 0017 as live guidance. 0044 superseded it -- there is no domain module to group into, so there is no domain list to settle. |
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jschoubben
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ccbbfa9c8a |
One node runs the control plane, and nothing takes over
Closes the two open questions in 06 and 08, which turned out to be one question: how many control planes run, and what happens when the hub is down. Both were drifting toward redundancy by default -- a standby plane, a second hub, an election to pick between them. That is not one feature but a property every layer must then honour, and each layer gets it wrong independently. Not wanted, and not needed. A handful of machines with one node hosting the registry is not a distributed system. The argument for why this is sound rather than merely cheap is that the design already tolerates it by construction. ADR 0036 makes reachability state rather than class; the host reconciles from its own store (0043) and never needed to ask anybody to hold the state it was last given. So the control plane being down is not a new failure mode -- it is every node in the ordinary disconnected situation at once. What is lost is change, not operation. No node holds a contended role: the control plane is assigned like any other module, and the overlay hub is declared (0050). No promotion, no quorum, no fencing, no split brain, no replicated store, and no "which node is authoritative" recurring at every layer. Two consequences stated plainly rather than buried. The control-plane node is a single point of failure -- deliberate, and said out loud so it stays deliberate. And recovery is restore rather than failover, which makes backup the availability story rather than hygiene. The sharpest one is the clock: the control plane owns certificate issuance (0049), so an outage outlasting a renewal window expires every public name. That bounds how long recovery may take, and nothing measures it today. |
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jschoubben
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4e80820e2f |
Design connectivity in full: overlay, resolution, exposure, filtering, certificates
Written as one document because the five are one design. They share inputs, they must agree, and every one of them today is computed in a different place by a different module from a different copy of the same facts. The through-line is that none of the five can be answered by a machine alone, so all five are decided centrally and delivered as `file` resources. That costs no new host vocabulary and removes both remaining direct database connections from nodes -- wireguard and traefik are the only two, and both are connectivity. Three decisions fall out, all proposed: 0050 -- reachability is declared, not inferred from an address. The RFC1918 regex is wrong for carrier-grade NAT (100.64/10 tests as public, so an endpoint is written to an address nothing can reach), wrong for IPv6, and wrong for a routable address behind a closed firewall. The lab needing TEST-NET-3 to satisfy the regex is the same bug from the other side. Also kills hub election by address prefix, which fails silently and makes renumbering an outage. 0051 -- the enrolment token carries where the mesh is and how to recognise it. Closes two circles with one mechanism: verifying the mesh needed the CA, and obtaining the CA meant trusting whoever handed it over; and a node had to reach the mesh before it could resolve any mesh name. An address plus a fingerprint, carried out of band, resolves both -- and closes the CA question 0049 deferred. 0052 -- a filter rule names its source. `scope:` is declared in five manifests, is part of no rule type, and is referenced by no code, so those manifests appear to restrict ports and restrict nothing. Removed rather than implemented; the general fix is refusing unknown keys, which the host already does and manifests do not. Also corrects two claims in 0049 asserting wireguard was already handled. Research 006 says both modules still reach upward; neither is. |
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jschoubben
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8d9282d86b |
Resolve the ingress gap: a route is a grant
ADR 0048 named ingress as an unclosed hole -- nothing said what terminates TLS, how a public name reaches a container, or which tier owned it. Resolving it needed no new concepts, which is why it survived: nobody had applied the rules already written to it. Ingress is not substrate. The control plane does not need a route to start, and no node needs one to reach it -- the node dials out and has no listening control surface. It grants itself a route afterwards, like a bucket. A route is an instantiation edge under ADR 0044. The direction mirrors a database -- the consumer supplies a target and receives a name rather than credentials -- but it is the same edge. The substantive finding is that exposure is three facts at two scopes: name resolution and certificate issuance need to know which node is publicly reachable, and only the proxy mapping is a single machine's business. That is why it belongs to the connectivity context, and why Traefik doing all three on the node is wrong. Which matters beyond tidiness: research 006 counted traefik as one of two modules opening a direct Postgres connection, reading nodes and mesh_ca. That violates 0037, 0045 and 0039 at once, and is why every node permanently holds a credential to the control plane's database. Deriving the config centrally and delivering it as `file` resources removes it, costs zero new host vocabulary, and closes the set 0039 identified -- wireguard was the other. Left open deliberately: the mesh's internal CA is the other thing traefik reads, and it belongs to the link's mutual authority, not to exposure. Conflating the two is what made the gap hard to see. Also fixes an inconsistency from the previous commit: 06 still claimed the virtual host was raised from the bundle. Proposed, not accepted -- for review. |
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jschoubben
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4d19e93900 |
Name the substrate's actual products
The design layer described every service by role and never once by name: Postgres appeared in zero design documents. That was over-application of the research rule "never identify the mesh it observed", which is about node names and domains, not software. Two things were actually broken by it. substrate.lock pins images by digest and a digest belongs to a named image, so the bundle could not be written from the design. And a reader could not tell a settled choice from an unexamined one -- "a relational store" reads identically either way. ADR 0048 names them: PostgreSQL, LavinMQ, MinIO, an OCI registry, Docker. The argument for each is continuity, which is a real argument -- replacing a substrate service migrates the mesh's own state. Role and product are now both written, because the design depends on the protocol while the installer needs the product. Also separates two questions the substrate doc had merged: being substrate and being in the bundle. Only Postgres must precede the control plane; the rest are substrate by role and ordinary by delivery. Whether the bus joins it is left open, because it turns on the control plane's internal shape. Names the forge as Gitea, and records ingress/Traefik as an unclosed gap rather than a naming one -- nothing says what terminates TLS or which tier owns it. Fixes a miscount: the host's bootstrap vocabulary is six shapes, not five. |
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jschoubben
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93470f6162 |
ADR 0047 — the bundle may carry actions the link may not
The bootstrap's sharpest open question, and the framing was wrong. "State on this machine" was being read as the filesystem and the service manager. A service running on this machine IS part of this machine — writing a file and creating a database in a local store differ in mechanism, not in scope. The real question was underneath: must the host learn what a database is? It must not. Giving it a `database` resource type means tier 0 knows Postgres, then a bucket, then a virtual host — the host acquiring the substrate's vocabulary one service at a time, which is what ADR 0037 exists to stop. So the bundle declares an ACTION and the host runs it and verifies it. What a database means stays with the module that provides one; the host knows only how to run a declared action against something local and check the result. Its vocabulary grows by one shape rather than by one resource type per service. Actions are permitted in the bundle and forbidden over the link, and the asymmetry is deliberate. A bundle arrives WITH the binary: anyone able to put a hostile action in it could equally have put it in the host itself, so refusing actions there buys nothing and costs the bootstrap. The link is a separate party, reachable separately, and an action there is the unbounded blast radius ADR 0039 refuses. That decision stands unchanged. And ongoing provisioning is not the host's at all — the control plane does it once a mesh exists — so the asymmetry costs nothing. Which dissolves the earlier worry about one mechanism with a tier boundary inside it: there are two mechanisms, with different actors, scopes and trust models, and that is the answer rather than a compromise. Named rather than hidden: this is the escape hatch research 011 warned about, arbitrary code in the place hardest to remove later. It is bounded by being bundle-only and by every action having to declare how it verifies itself, and that boundary is the whole defence. |
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jschoubben
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5b3d0ebd4f |
ADR 0046 — the installer fetches what it pins
The blocking question was where a container image comes from, and the version that blocked assumed the machine might have no network. That assumption came from the LAB: a scenario is a closed address space by design, which is what lets two scenarios hold the same addresses without meeting. Production is not sealed — a machine being adopted has a network, and one that does not is a machine where very little works anyway. So substrate.lock carries references, not payload: an image name and a digest, fetched at apply time. A first node pulls from upstream because no mesh registry exists yet; every node after that pulls from the mesh's own. The lab is the exception and places images itself, the way it already places the host binary — a property of a test environment, and letting it dictate the production design would be the tail wagging the dog. Pinned by DIGEST rather than tag. Reproducibility comes from pinning the identity of a thing, not from carrying its bytes, which is what makes fetching acceptable rather than a compromise. ADR 0041 survives untouched, which was the point. "Copy it onto a machine and run it" stays literally true — one binary, a few megabytes, which then fetches what it was told to. Carrying images would have quietly redefined the property that decision rests on. Costs accepted and named: an apply can now fail because something is unreachable, which a self-contained artifact could not, so it must fail legibly — naming what it could not fetch and from where. And the lab needs a way to place images into a machine that also has no container runtime, both of which are lab-installation concerns and neither solved here. Research 012's build-time-versus-apply-time reframing narrows accordingly: it still holds for what a tailored installer contains, and no longer has to hold for images. |
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jschoubben
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0531d6fc38 |
ADRs 0044 and 0045 — the module design, closed; 011 graduates
011 opened asking what a graph deletes and found the graph already existed. The work became design, worked through twenty cases and one provider in full. Two decisions close it. 0044 — a module declares presence, instantiation and exclusion. Two kinds of edge because a game wanting a database is not a game wanting postgres to exist: one creates something per consumer, carries credentials back, can be revoked, and leaves the provider holding state. Names are concrete unless providers are genuinely substitutable — `terminal` passes, `database` fails, and the adapter is what creates an interface. Where there is no contract there is a tag, which describes and does not bind. Exclusion is a third relation and is not derivable. A node provides names too, which makes capability checking stop being a separate mechanism and makes the host's detection an input to resolution. Constraints, never placement. Scope decides which provider and the binding is written down and sticky, in a place that follows the scope. And there are three entities, not two — the assignment carries what belongs to neither end, which is what node-agnostic modules ran out of. 0045 — a context owns its store, exclusively. No shared writes and no read roles on another context's store, because reading couples you to its layout just as firmly and invisibly. The unit is the CONTEXT, not the process: a board showing the mesh's own data is the mesh showing its own data. Asking or subscribing is derived from ADR 0036 rather than chosen. And it is the first clear list of what the design removes: grant kinds, table ownership, cross-context migration ordering, and a class of permission modelling. 0017 is superseded rather than narrowed — its text unchanged, its status changed. Folders assert relationships where edges record them, and the domain module goes with it. Left explicitly undecided in both: what a resolver delegates rather than reimplements, how many instances a module should have, and what a provider hands back. |
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jschoubben
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00d5ba8376 |
0042 and 0043, as approved
0042 becomes the operator's own rule and stops there: every merge into the main branch is notified and approved. Notified means proposed and said out loud, not performed and mentioned; approved means a person says yes to THAT merge. Who performs it is not the thing worth constraining, which is what makes an agent merging its own work unremarkable — the checkpoint already happened. 0043 answers the question it did not: where the ordered list comes from. By hand today, in substrate.lock, because the first node has no control plane to derive anything from. Afterwards the control plane derives it from module assignments, resolved configuration, and what each module declares it needs — ordered by the dependency graph, which is research 011. So the record is complete on the consumer side and deliberately silent on the producer side, and that is a legitimate order to settle them in: the host must refuse what it does not understand whoever wrote it. One consequence that only appeared when the question was asked: if the graph turns out not to determine a total order, that is 011's problem and not the host's. The host is still handed a list and still applies it as given. Recorded because it is the seam where a future difficulty would otherwise try to migrate into tier 0. Both were marked accepted before they had been read. Approved now, so the field is true — which it was not when it was written. |
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jschoubben
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bea052753e |
ADR 0043 — what a declaration is
Stage 2 could not start without it. Three constraints already bound the shape and between them they decide most of it. JSON, because the standard library carries it and carries no YAML, and a YAML declaration would put a third-party parser inside the one binary whose whole argument is that it needs nothing — to gain authoring comfort in a document generated by a machine and read by a machine. An ordered list, because ordering is a DECISION. A host deriving order from declared dependencies would be deciding the thing most likely to differ between what the control plane intended and what the machine does. The control plane knows what depends on what; it says so by saying when. Unknown is refused, never skipped — an unknown version, type or field refuses the whole declaration. A host that skipped what it did not understand would apply most of a declaration and report success, which is 04-ISSUES/003 with the declaration on the other side of the wire. Complete for what the host OWNS, and only that. It removes what it previously applied and is no longer declared, which it knows from the store rather than by inference, and never removes what it did not create — a converger that treats 'not declared' as 'must not exist' deletes what the mesh never put there. Two consequences arriving earlier than the build order suggested: the store is load-bearing at stage 2, because nothing can be removed without knowing what was applied. And a closed address space bounds the first vocabulary to what needs no network, because a scenario has no route to a package repository. |
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jschoubben
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23232e019a |
ADR 0042 — the approval is the checkpoint, not the second pair of hands
§2 said "never merge your own", written for people. Applied to an agent it produced a contradiction that surfaced immediately: an agent asked to merge cannot merge, because it authored what it is being asked to merge. So every merge here was either performed by the thing that wrote it, or not performed. Rejected the literal reading, because an operator clicking merge dozens of times without reading is not a checkpoint — it is the SHAPE of one, which is worse, since the record then claims a review that did not happen. Rejected dropping the rule, because the failure it prevents is not one an agent is less prone to. So the rule names what the checkpoint actually is: a person deciding, not a person clicking. Work may be merged by whoever wrote it once a human has explicitly approved that merge. What "explicit" excludes is the half that can rot, so it is enumerated: a standing permission cited forever, an instruction to do the work read as approval to merge it, silence, and the author's own judgement that it is ready. This narrows rather than relaxes. The obligation moves from who performs the merge to whether a person decided — a higher bar in the case the old wording permits, where a reviewer merges someone else's work without reading it. Synced, and verified by reading the rule back out of the live page rather than by trusting the publish. |
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jschoubben
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92e8c74ce4 |
ADR 0041 and the build handoff for the node host
Building tier 0 forced the question "the one binary installed by hand" had been carrying unexamined. A TypeScript host needs a runtime present before it runs, so the thing installed by hand becomes two — and the second must be installed by the means the host exists to replace. So the host is a statically linked binary that requires nothing present, written in Go. Rejected: a runtime installed first, which breaks the property the tier rests on; and bundling the runtime into the executable, which carries ninety megabytes to preserve a language choice and puts a young feature at the bottom of the stack. The argument that decided it is architectural rather than about taste. 0037 means the host never queries the mesh database and 0039 means it only receives declarations, so the host shares NO code with any other tier — not a client, not a schema, not the SDK. The language boundary falls exactly on a boundary that already exists, and a second language usually costs duplicated logic where here there is none to duplicate. §8 gains a scope: it said "TypeScript throughout" when everything was a service or a surface, and is now scoped to those with tier 0 named. Another sync owed. Playbook 04 steps 2 and 4: repos.md records mesh-host as existing, the design takes code: [mesh-host] and status: in-progress. |
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jschoubben
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6e4fc5d69b |
ADR 0040 and the constitution sync — absorb, then publish
The sync came due for three accepted rules. Reading the target before overwriting it found the source and the enforced copy had diverged unrecorded, and that a literal republish would have DELETED rules the mesh enforces: the live page's §4 carried SOLID, layering, TypeScript strictness and DRY/YAGNI, which appear in no decision record anywhere and have been checked against for six weeks. Removal was not the safe alternative either. The orchestrator reads "when absent, no constitution is injected (backward-compatible)" — so deleting the page would not fail, it would silently inject nothing, and every design meeting would run unchecked. Three unenforced rules would have become all of them. So: absorb first. The code-quality rules land as §8 rather than §4, because appending renumbers nothing and every existing citation stays valid. They are marked as inherited — every other rule states the incident behind it, these state nothing because nothing was written down, and importing them silently would have claimed a provenance the document does not have. The review bar is resolved to a person who is not the proposer. The live page required two node operators; there is one, so the rule was never met and could not be — a rule that cannot be satisfied is not a high standard, it is one everything silently violates. Then published, and the read-back earned its place in the playbook: the FIRST publish reported success and changed nothing. New revision, new title, body unapplied — a malformed argument dropped silently. §5 demonstrating itself during its own publication. |