jschoubben
004057d85c
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.
03-DESIGN
The authoritative specification. Implementation is built against what is written here.
Two layers
| Folder | What it is |
|---|---|
00-as-is/ |
The mesh that exists today. Shipped behaviour, described as it is — including behaviour nobody would choose again. |
01-to-be/ |
The mesh being built toward. Every statement traceable to a record in 02-DECISIONS/. |
They are never mixed. A statement about the future does not belong in an as-is document, and an as-is document is never edited to describe an intention.
When a to-be design ships, it does not move. Its as-is counterpart is written or updated,
the to-be document's status becomes implemented, and both stand — one describing what runs,
the other recording what was intended. Deleting the intention loses the reasoning, which is
the expensive half.
Frontmatter
Every design document (not the READMEs) carries:
---
layer: as-is | to-be
status: designed | in-progress | implemented | abandoned
code: [] # owning code repo(s), from 00-META/repos.md
updated: YYYY-MM-DD # date of the last status change, not of text edits
decisions: [] # 02-DECISIONS/ records this document rests on
---
For an as-is document, status: implemented is the normal state — it describes something that
runs — and code: names where that implementation lives.
Status changes when implementation state changes, never because design text was edited. An
implemented claim must be defensible from the owning repository's main branch, not from
intent. If it cannot be checked, it is in-progress.
Cross-cutting views are generated from this frontmatter by the hq-status skill and never
written to disk.
What belongs here
Functional analysis, architectural description, and specification — prose and diagrams
only, no code. A manifest field may be named; a manifest may not be pasted. A document
enters the to-be layer only after the decision behind it is recorded in 02-DECISIONS/
and the research that produced it is closed.
Subfolders are encouraged where a layer grows enough to need them.