Closes the last open question about what the substrate contains. 0006
left an identity provider conditional — substrate only if the control
plane delegated authentication — and said the decision had not been
taken. It is now: it delegates to nothing.
The conditional was never about machines. A node proves itself with a
keypair it generated over a broker account issued at enrolment, and
declarations are verified by signature; none of that involves an
identity provider. It was only ever about whether a person signing in to
a mesh surface would be authenticated by something else.
So the substrate is three — a relational store, a message bus, an image
registry — and with 0028 having removed the object store, no member is
conditional and every one is there for the same reason.
It does not settle how a person signs in to a surface, deliberately.
What is settled is that whatever answers that is not something which
must exist before the mesh does, so it can be decided late or replaced —
which being substrate would have prevented.
The conversion method, recorded because it decides everything else and
was not written down.
The old control plane is stopped — provisioning, coordinator, syncs, the
pipeline, anything that decides or writes. The workloads it was managing
keep running, because nothing is managing them. The new mesh then takes
ownership one module at a time.
Nothing is ever unassigned in the old system. Unassigning is how it
removes things and removing is how data is lost; it is asked to stop
having opinions, never to take anything away.
Disabled rather than merely stopped, which is the part easy to get
wrong: those units are enabled, so a stop lasts until the next reboot. A
reboot mid-conversion would bring the old control plane back to
regenerate managed files underneath the new one — the one situation
where two systems really would fight over a machine.
A service left running with nothing managing it is the safe state: it
has its data, its configuration is on disk, and nothing will change
either. The risk in a conversion is in the managing, not the running.
Also records why taking ownership piecemeal is safe: the new host's
orphan removal is per-origin, so it only removes what it recorded
itself. Services it was never told about are not orphans to it.
0030, found by asking what the conversion actually needs rather than by
reviewing anything. The host deleted a directory and everything under it
when it stopped being declared — which happens when a module is
unassigned, or when a manifest is edited to move a data folder, which is
the exact operation this plan needs. A database's files, a mail spool.
The report said "removed".
A directory still holding something is now kept and said so. No flag and
nothing to remember: emptiness is the test, and it works because the
removal order was already right — the mesh's own contents are gone by
the time the directory is reached, so what remains is by definition
something nobody declared.
The plan now says data outranks its own ordering: copy, read back
through the service that owns it, and only then point anything at the
new location. Never move and then check.
And it records where this starts — the node holding all the production
data — with what that costs stated rather than argued with. Everything
proven so far was proven on machines that could be destroyed and raised
again. A scenario proves the mechanism, not the state on that machine.
Recorded because it is load-bearing and was not written down: moving
from the current system to this one is a person at a command line, not a
migration program.
What that removes is larger than what it adds. Nothing in this plan
needs an importer, a translation layer, a compatibility shim, or a way
of keeping two systems agreeing while both are live — each of which
somebody would otherwise reasonably build, use once, and maintain for a
year.
It also settles what "safe" means for the system being retired: a fix to
it must be safe on its own, because there is no careful rollout to
sequence it into. A change needing three steps in the right order is a
change that will be half-applied. That reversed a certificate default I
had chosen this morning.
Ordering needed no change for the third time running — resources apply
in the order declared and nothing sorts them — and is now asserted,
because sorting them for any sensible reason would have passed every
other test.
Separates ordering from readiness, which the task had run together: a
container started is not a container ready. Nothing waits, and what
needs something usable retries. That is deliberate and more robust than
start ordering, since a dependency can restart long after apply.
The network was the first thing in Phase 1 that genuinely needed
building, and the first that needed a decision: 0029 records why a shape
rather than an action, and the vocabulary is nine.
A session as a licence consumer needed no change either: the two
sessions are two modules, so the existing (node, module) binding already
names them apart. 14-model-access.md's "a step toward it and not it" is
true of a worker and not of a session, and the difference is that there
is one session per node rather than many per machine.
Records what stays open: the worker half of that gap is real and
unaffected, and belongs with 0003, which is unbuilt.
Two tasks in a row that were already possible. Both were written from
the design rather than from the code — the review's own finding arriving
in the plan it produced. The remaining Phase 1 items should be checked
against the code before being started rather than after.
An object-store provision, proven against a real store with seven
assertions.
The finding is worth more than the task: the control plane
special-cases nothing. provides, requires, contributes and grants are
name-agnostic, so asking for a bucket needed no change to the mesh at
all. What was missing was a provider and the last step on the machine —
"add an object-store provision" was never mesh work, and the breakdown
now says so rather than leaving the next person to rediscover it.
Named s3-bucket by 0027: the coupling is to the API, not the product,
because swapping one store for another does not break a consumer. A
database is the other case and names its engine.
Records the assertion a database does not need, because it is the one
that will be forgotten when somebody writes the next provider: one store
holds every bucket behind one endpoint, so isolation is a policy rather
than a property, and a policy granting everything passes every test that
only checks a consumer can reach its own bucket.
**0024 accepted.** Model access was decided, built, and proven in the
lab, and two design documents rest on it; only the status had never
moved. The gate is green again.
**The work breakdown rewritten.** It planned a decomposition of the
existing system in place — extract contexts, declared features, shrink
the shared library. That is not the work. A replacement is being built
beside it, and only the old Phase 0 survived contact with reality, so
the one document meant to say what happens next was describing a system
being retired.
Now ordered by what "modules move across one at a time until the old
registry is off" actually requires:
- Phase 0 is marked done against the twenty-two lab assertions, **and
carries its own limitation**: every module exercised was written to
test the mechanism, so the vocabulary was shaped by its own fixtures.
- Phase 1 is the vocabulary gaps found by asking what real modules
need — an object-store provision, a session as a licence consumer, a
network shape with ordering, public certificate issuance.
- Phase 2 is one module, then a week of running it, because the point of
going first is to find what Phase 1 missed.
- Phase 3 picks modules that each prove something the first did not; the
mail system is last because it is the one that may send work back into
the declaration language.
- Phase 4 is switching the registry off, named as a phase so it is not
mistaken for the goal.
Keeps the rules of engagement unchanged — they were about how work is
done, not what it is — with one addition: stop and ask before anything
that touches a machine outside the lab.
Adds a section on keeping the list true, since the document it replaces
was wrong for weeks and nothing said so. A claim here is counted, not
reasoned, and a phase is done when the lab says so.
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.
**0027 — provisions.** A module written against PostgreSQL could be
matched to a provider of SQL Server, resolve as satisfied, and fail on
its first query. The name said the role, so nothing distinguished
engines. Refusing on ambiguity could not help: with one provider of
each name nothing is ambiguous. Enforced at parse rather than
documented, because the old naming was the documentation.
**0028 — the substrate.** 0006 admits an object store on the grounds
that it cannot grant itself a bucket. That answers the second half of
the test and assumes the first: the control plane does not need one.
Verified — no S3 client in mesh-control, and internal/builder/registry.go
records the deliberate choice to put artifacts in the OCI registry as
content-addressed blobs. The row was inherited from the system being
replaced, where an object store distributed module tarballs, and was
never re-tested against the definition above it.
So an object store is an ordinary module, and a mesh with nothing
needing one runs none. Migrating it is module work, not substrate work.
0028 also states what 0006 left unsaid: a substrate service and a
module of the same product are different instances. The substrate is
raised from the bundle before any mesh exists, so it is not in the
module graph — a workload depending on it would depend on something the
graph cannot see, cannot rotate a credential for, and cannot move, and
would put workload data in the store the control plane keeps its own
state in.
Both records were found by reading code against design rather than
design against itself, which is the review that should have happened
sooner.
Answers the question 15 raised: a board showing many sessions leaves
one-per-node untouched, because each is still one conversation. Only
concurrent conversations with the same session would touch 0004.
Records soulstream and herdr as the prior art to draw from, and marks
it explicitly off the provisioning path so it stays a note rather than
becoming the work.
Settles the question 15 left open: the mesh session holds its own
memory in the mesh root, rather than assembling a view over the node
sessions. Memory follows the rule the rest of the design already uses —
the context root is the whole of what makes one session a different
agent, and memory is part of what makes it that agent.
The control-plane node is what makes this load-bearing rather than
tidy. Two sessions share that machine; if memory belonged to the
machine instead of the root they would share it too, and the mesh's
recollection would be indistinguishable from that node's own — the
collision 0026 exists to avoid, arriving through the back door.
Also corrects an error made writing it up: memory is NOT declared
state. The engram and tools are — the mesh says what they are and the
host writes them (0011). Memory is written by the session itself and
declared by nobody, so a mechanism that regenerates the root wholesale
would erase it on the next heartbeat, silently, while reporting
success. The root is not uniformly managed and which parts are has to
be explicit.
A session for the mesh itself, addressed as the mesh, differing from a
node's in exactly three things: the context it starts in, its engram,
and its licence binding. Not a new kind of agent — the same mechanism
pointed at a different root. Two implementations of one mechanism drift,
and the vocabulary collision 0001 exists to undo began exactly that way.
It runs on the control-plane node, and the reasoning is easy to get
backwards: not "the important agent on the important machine", but that
this node is already the one place excepted from "compromise of a node
is compromise of that node". Placed anywhere else it would create a
second such place.
It is an addition to per-node messaging and never a replacement. 0001
holds that losing the control plane costs change, not operation — and a
mesh whose only conversational surface lived there would lose the
ability to ask anything while every machine kept running perfectly.
Writing it up exposed that the node session's setup was never designed
at all. 0004 gives behaviour and stops: nothing said how a session
starts, where its context lives, or how a broker message becomes a
prompt. That gap was invisible until something had to be built *like* a
node session. 15-the-agent-session.md covers both as one mechanism.
It also makes "a consumer that is not a machine" undeferrable. The
control-plane node now hosts two sessions that must hold different
licences, and a per-machine binding cannot express that at all. Noted in
14-model-access.md against the gap it was already recorded as.
Also completes the to-be index, which stopped at 10 and omitted four
documents. Pre-existing broken ADR references in the older rows are left
alone rather than guessed at.
Retired in favour of the lab rather than repaired — that answers the
first open question. The second finding is the one that generalises:
"nothing runs it, and nothing reports that nothing runs it" is not a
fact about that harness, it is a fact about any suite too expensive to
run on every push. The replacement inherited the fault it was replacing.
Records the three rules that now hold, and what the fix taught twice:
the remedy rebuilt the symptom inside itself, and the code that counts
results passed every test while reading nothing.
A service is reached at <service>.<node>.internal, so what resolves is anything
under a node's name. The mesh writes the data and runs no daemon; two roles,
two claims, because systemd-resolved cannot serve a wildcard at all.
Both prohibitions were found by a machine rather than by reasoning: an address
systemd already held, and reading resolv.conf for upstreams that now point at
itself.
The field was called needs, beside secrets, and both were name-to-path holding
something secret. What separates them is whose, not how secret — so that is
what the name says now.
The connectivity design still said a hub cannot be filtered — a gap recorded in
the morning and closed in the afternoon, left standing as though it were
current. Worse than a stale date: it would send somebody away from something
that works.
`restart-on` was described nowhere, including the part added today that lets a
service reflect a file another module put on the machine. A rule the host
enforces and no document mentions is a rule nobody can rely on.
And nine of fifteen design documents claimed an `updated:` older than their last
change, some by a week. That field is what cross-cutting views are generated
from, so it is not decoration.
A resolver takes over /etc/resolv.conf, which is a singular resource — ADR 0009
lists it in the table beside the seat and pid 1. So choosing between resolved,
dnsmasq and unbound is assigning a module, per machine, and the mesh refuses
two rather than letting them fight over the file.
Recorded because it was treated as an open question two days after being
decided, which is the argument for that table being a table.
Found by a container failing to resolve a name every machine could: a container
gets its own hosts file holding only its own hostname, and on the machine it
always worked, which is what made it easy to miss.
Declared containers are given the names. A container somebody starts by hand is
not the mesh's to configure — which is a second, different reason to want a
resolver, recorded beside the first rather than folded into it.
Asked whether a machine that drops off needs re-adopting: it does not, nothing
expires, and the only thing that forces re-enrolment is losing its own key.
The gap was the twenty or thirty seconds after a resume in which a node
believes it is in a mesh it has left — recovering on its own, which made it a
quality gap rather than a fault, and still a machine waiting to be told
something it already knew.
It meant failed-or-refused, so the question this record says must not be lost
was answerable only for the machines that broke. Out of date, never told, and
not worked out are kept apart: the remedy is the same push and they read
differently to whoever is looking.
Their subject matter has been built and proven for days and their frontmatter
still said code: [] — which is what the cross-cutting view is generated from,
so it was claiming nothing existed for the substrate, the node lifecycle and
delivery.
One reading answered three ways, holding nothing and touching no context's
store — which is the constraint the whole document is about, and the thing the
board being replaced gets wrong.
Rotation and the provisioner contract; model access as a provision answered by
a record, with ADR 0024's other two gaps left as gaps; exposure, which closes
the open question about revoking a route; and the delivery loop, which closes
the gap ADR 0010 left when it replaced a pipeline with a comparison.
The broker's fingerprint travels with its credential, and the machine's
filesystem does not travel at all — it runs in a container, which is the
arrangement working rather than a limitation to route around.
Found by the firewall: every packet filtered as declared, and the machine
reported as not doing what it was told, because the unit that loaded the rules
had finished. Stated as a gap rather than worked around silently.
Otherwise it succeeds into a state its verify rejects, and the host's report is
accurate and names nothing. Recorded where the vocabulary is described, because
it is a rule about writing an action rather than about one action.
A hub needs its overlay port open and a node that is not a hub does not, and
they are the same module — so listens, a static manifest field, cannot express
it while the overlay module's resources are computed per node. Written down
rather than left as an oversight for whoever first puts a firewall on a hub.
Issue 014: the node's serving key was stored in the host's own encoding, so
every check that reads the file passed and no server could start. Same shape as
013 — two halves of one mechanism designed separately, each correct about its
own half. Where a file exists so a third party can read it, the format is the
interface.
Issue 003 is answered in both halves: manifests are parsed strictly, and a
module says what it listens on and from where rather than carrying a key
nothing reads. The design records what was built and how each part is checked.
Issue 013 is new, found by reading while writing the first module that has
both a computed file and a service that needs it. The file arrived second.
It failed, then the next reconcile fixed it, which is why nothing caught it.
Three additions, all written by trying to write a real database module
and finding out what could not be said.
A module may mirror an image it did not write. Naming an upstream
reference directly needs every machine to reach a public registry and
pins to a tag somebody else can move.
A module may need a secret of its own — a superuser password is not FOR
anybody, so the mechanism that hands credentials to consumers cannot
express it. Per node, so three machines have three passwords.
And the provisioner watches, which is what lets it be a module rather
than a binary somebody places. It polls rather than watching the
filesystem, because the host writes atomically and a watch on a replaced
path silently stops working.
One assignment now gets a working database provider: two directories, two
pinned containers, a sealed password and the grants manifest.
A page nobody had thought to ask for turns out to be the one a person
opens first: what is not doing what it was told. Recorded with the order
that matters — broken, then quiet, then out of date — because a page
leading with the last would bury the first.
And refused stays distinct from failed all the way to the page. They are
fixed in different places, so one word for both sends half its readers to
the wrong one.
Two additions to the module-repository design, both from building it.
A build machine has its own credential and it is not a node's: read the
build queue, write the mesh exchange, nothing else. A node's queue
carries that node's declarations.
The answer goes through the exchange and never the default one, because
permission there is per exchange rather than per queue — anything allowed
to use it can publish into any node's queue. The price is that every
asker sees every result and filters by correlation, which is cheap
against a builder never needing that permission.
And every result is kept, failures included, because one that leaves no
trace is indistinguishable from a build nobody asked for. That is what a
builds view reads; the board page is corrected to say so.
A build is work, not state, and that is why it does not travel as a
declaration: as one it would either rebuild on every reconcile or carry
"and I already did this", which is state about an event rather than about
a machine. So it has its own queue and the answer comes back correlated.
Three properties recorded because they are decisions: acknowledge only
once the answer is away, one build at a time, and a failure is a result
rather than silence.
And the board page is corrected. A build result today is answered to
whoever asked and kept nowhere, so a builds view has nothing to read. A
record of past builds is the missing piece, not the builder.
Designed with no reference to what came before, which was asked for. The
system this replaces has features — several deployable units inside one
module — and they are deliberately absent.
That closes something ADR 0001 has been carrying as an open prerequisite.
It lists "named features with per-node opt-in" as required, or "every
independently deployable unit becomes a module again and the count
returns". The premise was right and the remedy already exists in another
form: several modules, assignment per node, and a module with
requirements and no files of its own. `networking` is exactly that. The
count does not return because what made it return — a module is
expensive, so put several things in one — is gone. A module here is a
manifest and usually nothing else.
The manifest in a repository names artifacts; the manifest the mesh holds
names digests. Two documents, because a digest is not knowable until
something is built and a repository carrying one is wrong the moment
anybody edits anything.
The builder runs on a node. Building needs a container runtime and a
working tree, and what the control plane may send a machine is bounded by
the declaration language. A control plane holding a container socket
would be the one component that can do anything anywhere.
And the host's vocabulary grew from six shapes to eight — user and
archive — with the reasoning for each and for the refusals that came with
them. The count is asserted by a test precisely because every addition
widens what a compromised control plane can express.
Read from the board that exists. Eight sections; four are about work and
workers and are held back with that domain. The other four are the mesh
itself, and everything behind the main one already exists here — it is a
reader, not a second source of truth.
The constraint is the point of writing this down now. The existing board
is one service that reads every context's database, because that is the
shortest path to a page showing all of them at once. That is ADR 0008
violated by the one component with a reason to violate it, and the cost
is the same one the shared library has: a boundary nothing may cross is a
boundary that can move, and one thing crossing it is enough to freeze it.
So a board reads through interfaces and stores nothing. If a question is
slow, the answer belongs in the context that owns it, where everything
else asking gets it too.
First end-to-end raise. A machine with a container runtime applied the
bundle its host carries and ended with a store, databases, schemas, a
broker holding a certificate it generated itself, and the control plane
serving. Then it took a token, checked the broker against the pinned
fingerprint, generated three keypairs and enrolled — the first node being
a node whose mesh is not up yet, observed rather than argued.
And a credential crossed. Declared the provider of a database for a
second node and pushed to over the broker, the machine ended with the
password in one file at mode 0600, and that password appears nowhere in
the declaration that crossed the broker, nowhere in the control plane's
database, and nowhere in what the node reported back. That is the whole
secrets argument, measured.
One fault, in the joining: the token did not say what the mesh calls the
machine, so enrolment needed a flag its own help said it did not, and
failed at the broker with an empty username. It is the fifth thing a
token carries now — the node cannot work its own name out, because the
broker account it authenticates as is named after it and exists before
the mesh has told it anything.
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.
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.
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.
All on the first three machines to actually run it, and all invisible from the
mesh's own state: the graph was right, the files were right, the services were
up, every node reported success, and the network did not work.
A running interface does not re-read its configuration, so a node joining left
every existing node carrying a network that no longer existed. A hub sharing a
site with a spoke was emitted twice, which WireGuard refuses. Two nodes at one
site that neither can be dialled were peered directly, so nobody opened the
path and the more specific route blackholed -- this document's own warning
arriving in its implementation. And Docker sets the FORWARD policy to DROP, so
a hub with forwarding enabled still carried nothing between its spokes.
The last one is the sharpest: the substrate at tier 1 silently breaks the
network at tier 2, and nothing in either tier's state says so.
None of these is reachable by reasoning, and each was found within minutes of a
real machine trying it. That is the argument for the lab in one line.
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.
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.
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.
mesh-control is built as far as it can honestly go: one context of seven,
inventory, with its schema and the command that applies it. The repos map and
the control plane design say so, and point at ADR 0024 for what it took.
Separately, and more importantly: this repository described the enrolment token
as carrying three things when ADR 0004 says four. The missing one is the
control plane's signing identity -- the reason a node does not have to trust
the broker it dials.
Without it the control plane's authority is transitive through the broker, and
0004 spells out what that costs: a compromised broker could forge declarations,
and since the host applies whatever the link delivers, that is the whole
machine. The record has the argument in full; the design doc had dropped the
conclusion.
Found by reading the two together while deciding what the control plane must
store, which is roughly the only way it would have been found -- both documents
are internally consistent and only disagree with each other.
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.
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.
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.
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.
jschoubben