jschoubben
333356cff3
Jochen asked whether the order made sense. It did not -- it followed when things happened to be decided, which after consolidation is fictional anyway since record 5 alone folds decisions taken across a week. Concretely wrong before: the domain statement sat at 8, after five engineering rules; the constitution was scattered across 5, 12 and 17; the tiers landed at 15, 16, 21 and 22 with process records in between. Now it walks: what the mesh is (1-3), its tiers from the bottom up (4-8), what runs on them and how it gets there (9-10), how it is built (11-16), how it is checked (17-18), how we work (19-23). Two things made this safe rather than free. It is a permutation, not a compaction, so the renames go through temporary names -- otherwise two files want one slot and one is lost. And the reference rewrite is a single simultaneous pass, because almost every number moved into a slot another number was vacating; replacing one at a time would have cascaded and pointed things at the wrong record while still resolving. Verified: 284 [ADR NNNN](path) links across the repository, all with matching text and target. The ordering principle is now stated in 19 rather than left implicit -- the repository already said "the numbering is the flow" about its folders, and there was no reason for the records to be the exception.
Checks
python3 00-META/checks/records.py
Non-zero exit on any problem, so it can be a gate rather than a report.
Why this exists. Until now nothing in this repository was verified by anything but reading,
which is how a superseded decision stayed live in the constitution for days and in
01-to-be/README.md alongside it. Both were found by a person looking. how-we-build §5 says
an unenforced rule is indistinguishable from a wrong one, and costs more, because people
believe it — this repository was carrying several.
Every check here failed on something real before it passed. A check that has never failed is indistinguishable from one that cannot.
| Check | Asserts | Found |
|---|---|---|
links |
every relative link resolves | — (run ad hoc during authoring; now permanent) |
rests-on |
decisions: and extends: name records that exist and are accepted |
the class behind both incidents |
live-citation |
a governing document citing a superseded record names its replacement in the same paragraph | 01-to-be/README.md citing ADR 0022 as live guidance |
supersession |
if A says it was superseded by B, B says it supersedes A | ADR 0012 never declared that it superseded 0011 |
numbering |
the number in the filename is the number in the heading | — |
What is deliberately not checked
02-DECISIONS/and01-RESEARCH/may cite superseded records freely. A decision record discusses history; research records what was observed. Flagging those would produce noise on correct documents, and a check that cries wolf gets suppressed — which costs more than not having it.03-DESIGN/00-as-is/may rest on a superseded record. It describes what runs, and what runs was built under whatever was decided at the time (ADR 0006: as-is describing a superseded decision is exactly what as-is is for).- Whether a citation's prose is still true. Only whether the record it points at is live. A document can cite an accepted record and describe it wrongly, and nothing here notices.
So "governing" means 00-META/ and 03-DESIGN/01-to-be/ — the documents that tell somebody
what to do.
Adding a check
State what incident it would have caught, and make it fail before you make it pass. A check whose failure has never been observed is a guess about its own correctness.