Files
hq/04-ISSUES/127-a-module-event-derives-a-subject-nothing-publishes/00-report.md
jschoubben ce6ae943b7 Merge main: renumber this branch's records around the trunk's
Both lines of work numbered from the same point, so four decision records and one design
document existed twice with different content. The trunk keeps its numbers and this branch
yields — the only rule that scales, because the trunk's are already cited by what merged
before them.

  0117 the bus is the only broker        -> 0125
  0118 a module declares its own seats   -> 0126
  0119 amqp is a provision, not the bus  -> 0127
  0120 the mesh bus is required          -> 0128
  0123 a seat carries its role's protocol -> 0129
  0124 the predecessor is ending          -> 0130
  design 29, what a module declares       -> design 32

Applied to the code repositories too, because a stale reference is worse when numbers
collide than when they dangle: the reader lands on a real record that decided something
else.

Two reconciliations the merge forced, both real:

**0110 was marked wholly superseded and was not.** Its successor says in as many words that
everything 0110 decided about what a seat *is* stands untouched — and two records that
landed on the trunk rest on exactly that part. So it is accepted again, extended rather than
replaced, with a note saying which of its claims moved and where.

**A seat's protocol becomes columns, not fields.** The trunk moved the seat set out of
compiled code into a table the controller owns. This branch had added what a role accepts,
emits and serves to the Go slice. The decision is unaffected and the mechanism is better for
it: giving a role a protocol is now a write rather than a rebuild, which is the trunk's own
argument applied to what this branch added.

One check still fails and it fails on main too: a record resting on ADR 0112 while that is
still 'proposed'. Left alone — it is not this merge's to answer.
2026-09-27 18:23:41 +02:00

5.8 KiB

status, opened, located-in, fixed-by, amended-design
status opened located-in fixed-by amended-design
resolved 2026-09-27
mesh-catalog modules
mesh-control internal/catalogue
mesh-tools src
mesh-catalog 7b06a7a, mesh-tools fbeb373, mesh-control 05ff606 03-DESIGN/01-to-be/32-what-a-module-declares.md

127 — A module's event derives a subject nothing publishes

What was observed

Design 29 §1 says a module names an event locally and the mesh derives the subject: emits: order.placed becomes mesh.mod.<module>.event.order.placed, and a consumer declaring consumes: shop.order.placed subscribes the emitter's own subject. That derivation is built and tested.

Every event name in the catalogue is still written the way a routing key on the bus the mesh has is written — module.<module>.<verb> — and the derivation reads it as <emitter>.<event>. Asked of the composer directly, with the module names and declarations the catalogue holds today:

declared derived
builder emits module.builder.built publish mesh.mod.builder.event.module.builder.built
the catalogue consumes module.builder.built subscribe mesh.mod.module.event.builder.built
a media module emits module.<itself>.download.completed publish mesh.mod.<itself>.event.module.<itself>.download.completed
a player consumes module.*.download.completed subscribe mesh.mod.module.event.*.download.completed

The consumer's subject names a module called module. No cross-module subscription in the catalogue matches what any emitter publishes. Thirty-seven manifests declare events; every one of their consume declarations derives this way.

Two further consequences of the same cause, found in the same check:

  • One module declares consumes: "#" — the wildcard of the bus the mesh has, which is not a subject at all. The composer refuses it outright, so that module's account cannot be composed and the module cannot be assigned.
  • One module emits under a name that is not its own — it declares module.<other>.image.pushed while being a differently named module — which the derivation puts inside its namespace. Whether that is legitimate is a design question: design 32 §2 makes an event's source a fact the server enforces, and this is a module claiming another's name in its own event.

None of it fails on the bus the mesh runs on today, where a routing key is matched literally and nothing derives anything. It fails only once the subject is derived — which is to say it fails on the first mesh raised on the new bus, and not before.

Evidence: run against the controller's own PermissionsFor on the current feature branch, with the declarations read from the catalogue's manifests. Found while wiring the controller's consume side (design 28 step 3.4), when the controller's own subscription had to be written and the subject it would have to name turned out not to be the one design 32 specifies.

Why it matters beyond this instance

This is the failure ADR 0074 exists to catch, arriving by a route the conformance suite does not cover. Two implementations that disagree about an envelope do not fail to compile — they ignore each other while both keep running. Here it is not two implementations disagreeing but a declaration and a derivation disagreeing, and the symptom is identical: every service starts, every log is quiet, and nothing reacts to anything.

The fixtures cannot catch it. They pin one emitter's envelope against one subject, and both halves of that pair are correct. What is wrong is only visible when an emitter's derived subject is set beside a consumer's derived subject — a check nothing performs, because until the subject was derived there was nothing to compare.

It also means the rule 3.8 established is weaker than it reads. That task asserted no manifest contains a subject, which holds: a manifest contains a local name. What nothing asserts is that a local name derives to a subject some emitter actually publishes, and the rule as stated is satisfied by thirty-seven manifests whose names derive to nothing.

And it blocks work already scheduled. Design 28's step 4.2 (a build source's change reaching the builder over the bus) and 4.3 (an installation completing over the bus) are both event flows through exactly these pairs, and the catch-up flow the controller answers is a third — the controller currently replays a build announcement under its own name rather than the builder's, which a consumer filtering the builder's subject will not hear either.

Open questions

  • Is a local name converted per manifest (emits: built), or does the derivation keep accepting the old form and strip a redundant prefix? The first is thirty-seven manifests and a rule that can be checked; the second is a rule that cannot, because module.foo.bar is also a legitimate three-part local name.
  • What checks the pair? An emitter's derived subject against every consumer's derived subject is a whole-catalogue check, not a per-manifest one — and a module lives in its own repository and may be registered long after the catalogue was checked.
  • What are # and * in a consumed name? The bus the mesh has and the bus being built spell wildcards differently, and a consumes pattern is the one place a module writes one.
  • May a module emit an event named after another module, and if not, what does the module that does it today declare instead?
  • Who replays? A catch-up answer published by the controller under a builder's subject is the controller signing an event as another module, which is the thing the derived namespace prevents. If it must not, then a replay is a different message from an announcement, and the consumer needs to be told so.