hq/01-RESEARCH/012-the-minimum-viable-node/00-overview.md

---
status: active
initiated: 2026-08-26
touches:
  - 02-DECISIONS/0043-a-declaration-is-an-ordered-list-of-owned-resources.md
  - 02-DECISIONS/0004-managed-files-are-generated-never-edited.md
  - 03-DESIGN/01-to-be/05-the-node-host.md
  - 03-DESIGN/00-as-is/05-runtime-and-installation.md
  - 01-RESEARCH/011-the-module-graph/00-overview.md
---

# 012 — The minimum viable node, and adopting what is already there

## What is being investigated

Two questions that turn out to be one:

**What is the bare minimum to run a one-node mesh?** Not the tiers as asserted, but the actual
closure — take the thing that must run, walk what it needs, and the set that comes back is the
answer.

**And how does a machine that is already in use become that?** A candidate node is not empty. It
has a package manager, probably a container runtime, possibly a git installation, each with
configuration somebody chose. The mesh must **own** those, and owning is not the same as finding
them present.

## Why

Building tier 0 reached a wall that looked like a packaging problem and is not.

The host can be told to run a container or install a package. Both need a file — an image, an
archive — and the question was where the host gets it. That framing produced a bad trilemma:
carry everything in the bundle, download at apply time, or have something push the files in
first. Downloading fails on the first node, which cannot fetch the image registry from the image
registry it is trying to start.

**The reframing:** the machine is not offline. What matters is *when* the fetching happens. Move
it from apply time to **build time** — build the installer on a machine that has a network,
tailored to the target, and apply it on a target that then needs nothing. That is the same move
the lab already made for its router image, and the same property the delivery design already
claims: what ships is self-contained and a deploy touches no network.

Which makes the interesting question not *where do artifacts come from* but **what is missing
from this particular machine**, and that needs both of the questions above answered.

## What tailoring implies

- **The binary stays generic; the payload is tailored.** One static host per architecture. What
  is machine-specific is the bundle it applies. Rebuilding the host per machine would buy
  nothing.
- **Detection is the input, not a report.** What the host already reports about a machine —
  its profile and inventory — is what the difference is computed against. This is the first use
  of stage 1 by something other than a person reading it.

## Adoption

**Simply having a package installed is not enough.** If the mesh manages the container runtime,
it decides that runtime's configuration; a runtime found already installed carries settings
somebody chose, and those cannot be discovered by noticing the binary exists.

So a machine already in use is **adopted**: what is there is read, taken over, and thereafter
generated.

**This was the original path.** [`00-as-is/05`](../../03-DESIGN/00-as-is/05-runtime-and-installation.md)
records adoption of a pre-existing machine's configuration as the original mechanism, since made
legacy and explicitly out of scope for the lab. It returns here for a different reason than it
was dropped for, which is a thing to notice rather than to gloss.

**It creates a state that does not exist today.** [ADR 0004](../../02-DECISIONS/0004-managed-files-are-generated-never-edited.md)
has managed files generated and never edited; adoption needs a one-time import before that rule
starts applying. Three states, and the middle one is new:

> unmanaged → **adopted once** → generated

**And it crosses a boundary just drawn.** [ADR 0043](../../02-DECISIONS/0043-a-declaration-is-an-ordered-list-of-owned-resources.md)
says the host never touches what it did not create — the rule that stops a converger deleting
what the mesh never put there. Adoption is the deliberate act of taking ownership of exactly
that. The rule needs a companion rather than an exception: *never, unless adoption made it the
host's*, with adoption being explicit, recorded, and visible in what the host says it owns.

## Nothing is taken over without keeping what was there

**Before adoption touches a file, the original is kept.** Adoption happens on machines somebody
is already using, and the configuration being taken over is configuration somebody chose. A
one-way door on a working machine is not an installation, it is a risk nobody agreed to.

This is a *never* rule rather than a courtesy, and it earns that by the same incident the mesh's
strongest rule already carries: the worst loss in this record came from a tool acting on a path
it did not own. Adoption is that act, made deliberate — which makes the safeguard obligatory
rather than optional.

What that requires, and what remains open: where the copy lives, whether it is recorded in what
the node knows about itself so that adoption is *visibly* reversible, and whether the mesh keeps
it forever or hands it back when it stops managing the thing.

## Adoption produces a briefing, not just a result

Proposed by the operator, and it answers a question this effort had open with two bad answers.

Adoption meets things a script cannot decide. A container runtime configured with one storage
driver and a mesh wanting another. A package pinned to a version somebody chose for a reason.
Local settings the mesh has no opinion about and no business discarding. Silently winning is
wrong in both directions; refusing outright makes a machine in use unadoptable.

**So adoption has two outputs.** What it did — mechanical, recorded, in the node's state. And a
**briefing**: what it found, what it took over, and what it could not resolve, written to be
read by a person or an agent, which is the first thing a session on that node has to work with.

Conflicts are **flagged, not resolved**. That is the same principle the declaration parser
already applies — name every problem at once, to somebody who can act on it — at a larger
scale, and applied to a case where refusing wholesale would be worse than proceeding.

### On conflict, the machine's configuration is kept

Decided by the operator, after first deciding the opposite — recorded that way because the
reasoning for each direction is the useful part.

Where the existing configuration and the mesh's disagree, **what is already on the machine
stays**, the conflict is flagged, and it is reconciled afterwards. Adoption always **completes**
— flags inform, they do not block — and *adopted with open questions* prevents nothing. The
node is a node.

**What this buys.** Adoption becomes non-destructive by construction. The class of conflict 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 ever overwritten. A machine in use keeps working exactly as it
did.

**What it exposes, which is the mirror of what it fixes.** The mesh's configuration is not only
preference. Some of it is what a module needs in order to function at all. Keeping the machine's
version there produces a module that is installed and does not work — *an installed package is
not a capability*
([04-ISSUES/007](../../04-ISSUES/007-an-installed-package-is-not-a-capability/00-report.md))
arriving from a direction that issue did not anticipate. And a fleet where every node kept its
own settings is a fleet where a module works on one node and fails on another with nothing in
the mesh able to say why.

**The distinction that dissolves both rules.** Neither direction is right as a blanket, because
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, and preferences should always yield to what is already there.

That is a property of the module's own declaration rather than of the adoption algorithm, which
makes it one more thing the graph would carry
([research 011](../011-the-module-graph/00-overview.md)). Until modules can say which of their
settings are load-bearing, adoption is choosing a default in the dark, and the default chosen
here is the one that does not break the machine it is adopting.

## Open questions

| Question | Why it is open |
|---|---|
| What is the closure for a one-node mesh? | The skeleton asserts four pinned services. [Research 006](../006-mesh-from-scratch/00-overview.md) already asks whether it is four or five and does not answer. A graph gives a computed answer instead of an asserted one, which is [research 011](../011-the-module-graph/00-overview.md). |
| Is "tier" the same thing as a graph level? | Tiers were named as a bootstrap order. If the closure is computed, tiers may be a derived view of the graph rather than a separate concept — or they may be a coarser boundary that survives for a different reason. |
| ~~What happens when existing configuration contradicts what the mesh needs?~~ | **Answered** — the machine's configuration is kept, the conflict is flagged, and it is reconciled afterwards. |
| ~~Do flags block, or only inform?~~ | **Answered** — they inform. Adoption always completes, and the node is a node. |
| Can a module say which of its settings are load-bearing? | The question that dissolves the conflict rule rather than choosing a side. A setting the module *requires* cannot be kept from the machine without producing something installed and broken; a setting it merely *prefers* should always yield. Until a module can say which is which, adoption is defaulting in the dark. Belongs with the graph. |
| How is a flagged conflict reconciled, and by whom? | The briefing hands it to a session. What that session is empowered to change, and whether the resolution is recorded so the next adoption does not re-raise it, is undecided. |
| Where does the kept original live, and for how long? | Whether it is recorded in the node's state so adoption is visibly reversible, and whether it is returned when the mesh stops managing the thing. |
| What shape is a briefing? | Structured enough to be acted on, prose enough to be read. It is the first thing a session on a new node sees, which makes it an interface rather than a log. |
| Does owning a package mean owning its version? | Owning configuration and owning the package are different scopes. The second means the mesh decides which version is installed, and that decision then has to survive the machine's own package manager updating it. |
| How does a bundle stay true between building and applying? | It is built against a scan of the target. The machine can move between the scan and the apply, so the host has to verify rather than assume — and fail plainly when the bundle no longer fits. |
| What cannot be precomputed at all? | Anything built from source on the target still needs a toolchain and a network at that moment. Tailoring moves that cost rather than removing it, and *minimal viable* has to be honest about what it cannot ship ahead. |
| Does presence differencing understate the gap? | Knowing a package manager is installed does not say it is the version the mesh needs. A difference computed on presence alone is optimistic. |