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Author SHA1 Message Date
jschoubben 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.
2026-08-28 18:53:19 +02:00
jschoubben 72b22830f3 ADRs 0036, 0037, 0038 — what a node is, what the host does, how one joins
0036 (accepted): a node is a managed machine, and disconnection is a situation.
The open question posed a class distinction — full nodes and lesser presences.
There is none. Reachability is state, not kind, which promotes the host's local
store from a component to a requirement: it is what makes disconnection ordinary
rather than exceptional. The reduced contract the question reached for is real
but it is capability, and that belongs in the profile.

0037 (accepted): the host applies, it does not decide. Measured rather than
argued — the absorption is smaller than the machinery that already applies
state, and eight of ten adapters carry no dependency to move. The two that do
open a Postgres connection to the control plane, which inside tier 0 is the one
thing the tier rule exists to forbid. So each concern splits: deciding needs
every other node and stays in tier 2; applying needs root and locality and goes
to tier 0. The host carries ONE concern, of which the six are instances.

0038 (proposed): a node joins by linking first. The operator's two-modes
proposal, adopted as intent and corrected as structure. Two modes is two code
paths where the first runs once per mesh and rots — and the mesh already has
that fault in its worst form, as three hand-run shell scripts. Instead: one
behaviour, two sources of declaration. The first node is not a different kind of
node, it is a node whose mesh is not up yet, and its specialness is temporary
and self-erasing.

0038 also shrinks the migration 0037 called expensive: a joining node never
needs mesh-wide state, because the hard part of the overlay is only needed to
compute the WHOLE mesh. It needs one peer. The rest arrives.

Left open and said so: what may be pushed over the link and how a joining node
proves it is entitled to join, and whether one host can raise the substrate
alone.
2026-08-25 10:34:45 +02:00