The controller's inbound is through a seam with both transports behind it, and
the store window is now the server's rather than the controller's memory. Seven
claims about that were asked of a running server rather than reasoned.
Wiring the controller's own subscription is what found issue 127: every event
name in the catalogue is still written the way a routing key is, so design 29's
derivation turns a consumer's declaration into a subject no emitter publishes.
Thirty-seven manifests, one that cannot be composed at all. It fails on the first
mesh raised on the new bus and not before, which is why nothing had caught it —
the conformance fixtures pin one emitter against one subject, and both halves of
that pair are correct.
The node-facing flows are unaffected: those subjects are the mesh's own and
derive from nothing a module declares.
It waited on a retirement condition 0119 abolished when it made the
deprecated broker an ordinary provider. A step waiting for a condition
nobody set would sit open forever.
A claim the whole enrolment handshake rests on, now measured against a
running server rather than reasoned from documentation — and held by a test
so it cannot become folklore if a server version changes.
The guarantee is the same and the mechanism is simpler — a nak with a
delay, no parked list, nothing lost when the controller restarts. It costs
one thing: a naked message comes back whatever happened meanwhile, so an
older report is redelivered after a newer was applied. A report already
carries the digest of the declaration it answers, so supersession becomes a
check rather than memory — ordering settled by what a message says, not by
when it arrived.
Two things. A paragraph from the superseded 0117 survived beside the 0119
correction that reversed it, so §5 said both that the amqp interface
retires and that it does not. The stale one is gone.
And the framing. §1 opened with "the bus carries five kinds of traffic
today, and this design keeps the five", with a column mapping each to the
queue it used to be — which describes the mesh's nervous system as a port
of something that did a fraction of this. It now says what the bus is: a
role addressable without knowing its holder, the mesh's own state, work
that queues until somebody can do it, and permissions derived from what a
module declared. Conditions, observation and a person's client land there
too as they are built.
Glossary gains `bus` and `the deprecated broker`, with a note on why not to
say "compatibility broker" or name it after a protocol — the second invites
exactly the backwards framing this commit removes.
The mesh models machines but not the people on them — a node record
holds no username, and no module places anything under a home. So who
you are on each node (jochens/ace/jochen) is unknown to the mesh, and
nothing owns ~/.ssh, dotfiles or ~/.config. HAL knew it; the nox mesh
dropped it. Proposes the account as a node fact and a home-scoped
resource class (the ~/ mirror of ADR 0112's /var/lib placement), with
the login key staying the operator's (ADR 0051). Not urgent — HAL's
generators still run — load-bearing at node-by-node retirement. Found
generating ~/.ssh/config from HAL's registry, which nox has no
equivalent for.
Task 3.2. ADR 0074's model is untouched — floor plus capabilities, partial
implementations legitimate, identity from the credential, dedup on
x-event-id, conformance as executable fixtures. The transport beneath it is
rewritten: exchanges and queues become subjects and streams.
Statements marked *verified* were checked against a running server while
the runtime's client was written, not reasoned from documentation. Three
of them are things the specification would otherwise have got wrong:
- the payload is the body alone, with metadata in NATS headers; an
implementation that nested the whole envelope would agree with nobody
- a durable name may not contain a dot, while the ack subject joins two
names with one — conflating them looks right in a permission list and is
refused as a consumer name
- a certificate must carry a name the bus is dialled by, because the NATS
client has no hook to replace hostname verification the way pinning did
on AMQP
And one limitation lifts: a module may now call another's tool. Issue 049
recorded that a scoped account could not declare the reply queue a caller
needs, and ADR 0095 routed every ask through the control plane because of
it. Per-account inbox prefixes plus allow_responses replace that. ADR 0095
is not reversed — the control plane is still how a person asks — but
module-to-module calling stops being a question about capability and
becomes one about policy, which `uses` already answers.
The NATS client has no checkServerIdentity hook, so pinning no longer makes
the name check redundant — the bus's certificate must carry a SAN matching
the address nodes dial.
A holding is derived at resolution from manifests, never stored, so there
are no recorded old names to rewrite. The work is an edit plus a kept rename
table — kept because a module lives in its own repository and may be
registered long after the catalogue stopped using an old name.
The manifest already uses serves for a provision's facts, so a module's
tools take their own key. Declaring them is itself new — until now a
module's tools existed only in a runtime environment variable.
Storage is not a property of a subject — a stream is a separate object that
covers one — so the question is always how many streams, not which topics
are durable.
Three facts decide it, two of them verified rather than assumed: NATS
refuses overlapping streams instead of merging them, so a shared stream
plus a per-module one is not available at all; a filter cannot express an
exception; and a stream per module turns one cross-module consumer into one
per module. So one stream, with per-subject caps for the fairness that
matters. Per-module age is genuinely unavailable, and a module that needs
it declares a seat.
2.3 was already true and is now proved — the seat refusal is generic, and
three tests pin what matters: a second bus is refused by name, a different
bus implementation is refused too (which is what makes the bus replaceable),
and the AMQP broker no longer contends so both run on one mesh.
2.1/2.2 turned out not to be a no-op. The host keeps a container only when
its spec matches exactly; genesis raises the upstream image and the module
declares the mesh-built one carrying the entrypoint, so assigning it
recreates the container. That is ADR 0067's pivot and it is safe only
because the bus carries nothing yet — which is why step 2 comes before
anything speaks NATS. After it, never again: the config is a directory
mount, so accounts change without touching the container's spec.
Design 29 said no module requires the bus. The catalogue disagrees: 49 of
72 modules take a broker credential and 23 do not, so an ambient connection
mints an account for a third of the catalogue that never speaks — and the
49 each hand-write the path it lands at, which is provisioning done badly
by hand.
The bootstrap argument that made it ambient was narrower than it looked.
"A provisioner needs an account before it can run" is true of a provisioner
process and says nothing about a provision the controller answers, and the
controller is not waiting on a bus account to compose one.
So: the mesh-broker seat delivers mesh-bus; a module requires it and gets an
address, a sealed credential and the trust to verify the server; a module
that requires nothing has no account at all. The requirement delivers the
connection, the declarations shape the authority, and declaring a subject
without requiring the bus is refused as incoherent.
mesh-bus and nats are deliberately two names: a module may run its own NATS
as a backing service exactly as one provides amqp, and a manifest saying
"nats" would otherwise mean either the mesh's nervous system or a private
queue.
The seat's Delivers was wrong twice today — amqp, then empty — and the
comment says so rather than reading as though it were always right.
0117 went a step further than it had grounds for. It was right that the bus
is the only bus, and wrong that the amqp interface must therefore retire —
because it conflated two reasons to want a broker. Using one to reach
another module is a second bus and stays refused. Needing an AMQP broker as
a backing service, the way something needs a database, is ordinary, and
forbidding it would make the mesh unable to run normal software while
calling that architecture.
So the broker becomes a plain provider module: no seat, not foundation,
never raised at genesis, no retirement condition. lavinmq now claims nothing
and provides amqp; nats claims mesh-broker and provides nothing.
The rule that survives is about direction, not software: inter-module
communication goes over the bus. A module may hold a broker for itself; it
may not use one as a channel to another module. That is a review judgement
where 0117 could have used a parser, which is the honest cost.
0106's progressive insight was itself wrong and is corrected by a second one
there — nothing moves off the old broker, so its "one purpose" sentence does
not become true, it is just not what that server is.
The insight check needed two fixes it found itself: a date may carry
trailing words, and a bold run with a link is discussing an insight rather
than marking one. All four bad shapes still fire.
1.1 to 1.4 built and tested. 1.5 turned out to need no controller change:
it already resolves the broker by seat and names no broker module in its
source, which is what ADR 0079 was for. The genesis module set naming is
scenario and installer config, carried with the bed.
Recorded what must NOT change yet: the amqps:// credential shape and the
5671 default are correct until the rollout, because steps 1-4 leave every
node on AMQP.
29 put a module's events and tools in one namespace, 25 kept mesh.events.*
and mesh.tools.*. One namespace is right — a module's authority over its own
name becomes a single pattern the server enforces — but it needs a kind
token, because a stream is a subject filter and mesh.mod.*.> would persist
every tool call in the mesh. Tools stay on core NATS for the reason 25
already gives.
So: mesh.mod.<module>.event.<name>, .tool.<name>, and seats the same shape.
Found composing the first real configuration. Scoping every inbox to its
owner is right and leaves a responder unable to reply, because the answer
goes to the caller's inbox. The fix is not a wider grant but the server's
own allow_responses: one reply to the subject of a message the user actually
received. Without it every tool call times out while the permission list
looks correct.
Versioning: additive is free; a breaking change is refused while callers are
bound, and the refusal names them, because the mesh already holds the uses
graph; a real break versions the subject, not the seat name, so the role
does not fork; binding is a recorded pin, not a drift to whatever is newest.
Semantic change stays open — no fingerprint sees it, and saying so beats
implying the check is complete.
Provisioning: a provisioner's create/remove/holds IS a serves protocol, so a
provision interface is a seat that also delivers a credential — which is why
design 26 already allowed that. The per-consumer resource is what stops the
two collapsing into one.
Secrets: sealed, so the bus is never trusted with plaintext — but sealed is
not enough, because a stream persists and a durable ciphertext is an archive
the day a key leaks. So a secret never enters a stream: core request/reply
only, and a declaration names a secret rather than carrying one, which is
0098's fetch-don't-store applied where carrying is worst. The vault's own
credential and the bus's own accounts are the two bootstrap exceptions,
resolved the way 0067 resolves the control plane.
Also rewrote the addresses paragraph, which was too compressed to follow:
on-bus addresses disappear because nothing stores them, off-bus ones are
untouched and still 0098's problem, and the bus's own address is the one
that cannot be a subject.
The architecture 0117 opened needs a module to offer a service as a role on
the bus — one holder, addressed by what it does. A closed table in the
controller cannot express that: a capability a module contributes would
require changing the mesh itself.
But 0110 closed the set for a good reason — nothing could say what seats a
mesh had, and the hand count came out at eleven of thirteen. That argues for
enumerable, not hardcoded, and 0110 weighed free-form against a fixed table
without considering a third option: closed at any moment and derived from
the catalogue. A derived list cannot drift, which is how the count broke.
So: the mesh's seats stay the mesh's, reserved by the mesh- prefix so the
prefix is the rule and there is no list to maintain; ten seats are renamed
to restore 0079's convention; everything 0110 decided about what a seat IS
survives untouched.
Design 29 carries the declaration model: three namespaces, subjects derived
from local names so a manifest survives the wire changing, queues never
declared, five relationships (the job and state shapes 0041 had no room
for), and the build-publish-deploy lifecycle with hard, soft and build-time
dependencies distinguished.
0041 gets a progressive insight: "no per-consumer setup, only a
subscription" was a fact about a topic exchange, and a JetStream durable
consumer is a real object someone creates.
WBS 1.3/1.4 were wrong and say so: streams come at registration and
consumers at assignment, so only the foundation set belongs at genesis.
Issue 115 is resolved and converted four modules away from named volumes;
the bus's own data is not the place to bring one back. Also: NATS carries
TLS on the client port rather than beside a plaintext one, so there is no
5671/5672 pair to mirror.
A module does declare requirements the provisioner fulfils — but the broker
it gets that way is a private vhost, the analog of a database, not the
mesh's bus. Two modules of the new mesh depend on it, so the compatibility
broker was never single-purpose and its retirement would have stranded them.
NATS is the heart: one bus, a module's messaging is subjects on it scoped by
what it declares, and no module is handed a server of its own. The seat
delivers nothing; the interface retires with the broker. Also closes the
EVENTS question — one stream, on the bootstrap argument, not preference.
Designs 25 and 28 go in-progress: step 1 is starting.
The insight check caught a false positive on its own first real use — its
bold-run pattern crossed newlines and joined an unrelated `**` to the
marker. Constrained to one line, still catching all four bad shapes.
Both repository checks fail on main. 0115 is cited by no design, and it is
marked accepted while resting on 0112, which is proposed.
Design 27 already states the rule the record decides — "a module is assigned
at most once to a node, and that pair is the assignment's identity" — so it
is the home, and now says so. And 0112, 0113, 0114 and design 27 are all
proposed: the batch is under review, so the record is too. Promoting 0112
instead would be marking a record accepted to satisfy a check, which
check_rests_on names as a failure this repository already made once.
jschoubben
jochen