jschoubben
0106318bcb
Reversed by the operator, and both directions are recorded because the reasoning for each is the useful part. What is already on the machine stays, the conflict is flagged, adoption completes. This buys non-destructiveness by construction: the class that made the opposite rule dangerous — a storage driver against the filesystem it is actually on, a data directory pointing at a mount that exists — cannot arise, because nothing tied to the machine's physical reality is overwritten. It exposes the mirror. The mesh's configuration is not only preference; some of it is what a module needs to function. Keeping the machine's version there produces a module that is installed and does not work, which is 04-ISSUES/007 arriving from a direction that issue did not anticipate. And a fleet where every node kept its own settings is one where a module works on one node and fails on another with nothing able to say why. So neither direction is right as a blanket, and the question is not whose configuration wins. It is whether the module REQUIRES the setting or merely PREFERS it — required contradictions cannot be kept without breaking the module, preferences should always yield to what is there. That is a property of the module's declaration rather than of the adoption algorithm, which makes it one more thing the graph would carry. Until modules can say which of their settings are load-bearing, adoption is defaulting in the dark, and the default chosen is the one that does not break the machine it is adopting.
01-RESEARCH
Investigations that have not yet hardened into design.
Structure
Each effort lives in NNN-descriptive-name/ and must contain 00-overview.md, carrying its
state in YAML frontmatter and a prose summary below it:
---
status: active | graduated | abandoned
initiated: YYYY-MM-DD
touches: [] # design docs, subsystems or areas the effort bears on
became: [] # required when status is terminal — what it turned into
---
The prose says what is being investigated, why, and what it touches. It does not restate the status — status lives in one place, and two places is one too many.
Further documents in the same folder hold the work itself: notes, evidence, option analyses, draft designs.
Lifecycle
| status | Meaning |
|---|---|
active |
Investigation in progress. |
graduated |
Checked against 00-META, decided in 02-DECISIONS/, and specified in 03-DESIGN — see became:. |
abandoned |
Stopped or superseded. Nothing is deleted. |
An effort graduates by producing a decision record and a 03-DESIGN entry. It is abandoned
in place — never deleted. What was rejected, and why, is the more expensive half to
rediscover.
Starting and closing efforts is playbook territory:
00-META/process/01-research.md and
02-graduation.md.
Rules
- Markdown only. Do not skip or reuse a sequence number.
- Evidence, not assertion. An effort that measured nothing has not finished.
- Research describes real observations but never identifies the mesh it observed. The shape of a finding survives anonymisation intact.