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.
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.
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.
A record can assert a fact that goes stale while the decision it supports
stays right. Superseding for that buries a sound record under a second one
and makes every reader work out which is live. So a correction of fact is
now made in place, marked and dated, with the old wording quoted — bounded
by three conditions and checked by records.py, which fires on an unmarked,
undated or back-dated note. Judgements still supersede.
Applied to 0115: no conformance suite exists to recapture, and the full
genesis bed cannot run until the links exist. Designs 25 and 28 follow.
Settles the design repository now that the self-upgrade build is on main:
- Records the two decisions that shipped without a record — ADR 0077 (the
controller/foundation/node vocabulary) and ADR 0078 (the store and broker are
ordinary modules); accepts ADR 0075 and 0076, which shipped work rests on.
- Fills issue 051's amended-design and wires ADR 0078 into 07-the-foundation.
- Sweeps the repo rename (mesh-control -> mesh-controller) into the mutable docs
now that the forge repo is renamed; updates the glossary note and repos.md.
- Fixes the six broken links from the design-doc renames, indexes the glossary,
regenerates the decisions reading order.
Both checks (records.py, index.py) are green. Statuses stay honest: the build is
on main and lab-proven but not deployed as the production mesh, so the to-be docs
remain in-progress and the as-is layer (the hal mesh) is unchanged — graduation
to implemented + as-is belongs to deployment, not merge.
https://claude.ai/code/session_01D6qtiYU3P9jk3pnAXyAFyx
First pass of a design review, done by reading documents against code
and against a raised mesh rather than against each other. Every error
below was invisible to a proofread.
**Statuses were stale, and nothing checked them.** Ten to-be documents
said `designed` while naming working, lab-proven code — several with a
*What was built* or *Raised, and observed* section. Added a
`status-vs-code` check: naming a file is a claim that the file
implements this, so a document that points at one has stopped being
merely designed. It failed on all ten before it passed, per the rule
this folder sets for its own checks.
**The bundle carries three images, not two.** 07 reasoned about which
substrate services go in and overlooked that the control plane is in
there too — it is what the substrate exists to start, and there is
nothing to fetch it with yet. Counted, not deduced.
**The bootstrap uses four shapes, not six.** It listed `file` and
`directory`, which substrate-first-node.lock never asks for. The claim
that mattered — nothing is blocked on the host — was true either way,
which is why the wrong count survived.
**The eight capabilities were documented nowhere.** Implemented in
internal/profile/detectors.go and enumerated in no document, including
the one about the host that detects them. A vocabulary modules write
against, readable only by reading the code. Now written down, with the
seat/graphical-session distinction that is wrong in both directions if
collapsed.
**MinIO swept out of the to-be layer** per 0028.
The gate now fails on one thing left deliberately: ADR 0024 is
`proposed` while two documents rest on it and the feature it decides is
built and lab-proven. Accepting a decision is not mine to do.
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.
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.
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.
jschoubben