jschoubben
09489a298c
The tiers were settled and the product was named, but the repositories themselves existed only in a research sketch. That had already caused two problems. ADR 0029 makes the lab phase 0 of the migration and could not say where it lives, because no record named a repository. And the sketch contradicted an accepted record: it listed mesh-hq while ADR 0028 had decided novox/hq and explicitly rejected that name. A design resting on research is resting on something that can change without a decision. Corrected in the research too. The naming rule, which both earlier records implied and neither stated: a repository belonging to a product carries that product's prefix; a company-scoped one does not. That is why this repository is hq and the mesh's are mesh-*. Seven repositories recorded — host, substrate, control, surfaces, sdk, lab, and this one. The lab gets its own: it ships to nobody, outlives any single tier, and drives virtualisation on a workstation, which nothing else does. Inside the host it would couple development tooling to a shipped component; inside the control plane the bootstrap scenario would depend on a tier that does not exist when it is needed. Tier 4 is deliberately not decided. Whether the catalogue is one repository, one per domain or one per application stays open from ADR 0015 and is blocked on research 005 — how many repositories hold domains cannot be answered before knowing what the domains are. mesh-catalog appears in the sketch and is not decided by this record. The cost is stated rather than glossed: seven release cadences where there is one, and cross-repository changes that used to be one commit.
3.8 KiB
status, updated
| status | updated |
|---|---|
| canonical | 2026-08-23 |
The Novox repositories
The map of where implementation lives. Humans use it for orientation; agents use it for issue
triage (playbook process/03-issues.md). The code: frontmatter
field in design documents points at entries here.
Repository names are recorded; hosts, URLs and owners are not — this repository is public,
and a forge address is an operational detail (see README).
| Repository | Owns |
|---|---|
hal |
The monorepo — the node runtime, the module catalogue, the delivery machinery, and the bootstrap scripts. Every core module lives here. |
hq |
This repository, under the company organisation — mission, research, design, decisions, issue diagnosis. Company-scoped (ADR 0028); the mesh is its first product. The source of truth for why. Carries no implementation. |
| (one per application) | Every standalone application, site or side-project gets its own repository, with module.yml at the root. Registered with the mesh as a build source; built and deployed by the same pipeline as anything in the monorepo. |
What the mesh becomes
ADR 0030 records the repositories the monorepo decomposes into. None exist yet — they are the target, not the present.
| Repository | Tier | Holds |
|---|---|---|
mesh-host |
0 | the node host — the one binary installed by hand |
mesh-substrate |
1 | the four pinned services, as declarations |
mesh-control |
2 | the control plane and its contexts |
mesh-surfaces |
3 | tools, web, cli |
mesh-sdk |
— | contracts shared across tiers |
mesh-lab |
— | the lab — built first, per ADR 0029 |
Tier 4's shape is open, and deliberately so: see ADR 0030 and research 005.
What lives where inside the monorepo
Named by role, because the layout is itself part of the as-is design — see
03-DESIGN/00-as-is/.
| Area | Holds |
|---|---|
| Module catalogue | One directory per module, each with a manifest. Core modules sit under the mesh's own namespace; everything else at the top level. |
| Node runtime | The daemon and interactive runtime that every node runs. |
| Bootstrap scripts | First-node initialisation, joining an existing mesh, and node rescue. |
| Shared library | The SDK every module builds against. |
| Pipeline test harness | End-to-end coverage of the delivery pipeline. Currently unbuildable — see 04-ISSUES/005. |
Why applications do not live in the monorepo
A standalone application in the monorepo is a convention violation, and reviewers reject it.
The reasoning is recorded in 02-DECISIONS/0010:
the mesh installs, provisions for, and ships an application through exactly the same machinery
whether or not its source sits beside the mesh's own — so co-location buys nothing and costs
the monorepo's review cadence.
There is no npm workspace
Each module is a standalone package that consumes its dependencies from the private registry,
not from a sibling directory. The workspace was removed after it caused build-versus-development
divergence — a workspace member importing another resolved to local unbuilt source in the
pipeline and to a published version in development. Recorded in
02-DECISIONS/0007.
Consequence, and it is a real one: a cross-package change is two steps — publish, then consume
— and a repository-wide npm install does not exist.