jschoubben
41a4405253
Two additions to the module-repository design, both from building it. A build machine has its own credential and it is not a node's: read the build queue, write the mesh exchange, nothing else. A node's queue carries that node's declarations. The answer goes through the exchange and never the default one, because permission there is per exchange rather than per queue — anything allowed to use it can publish into any node's queue. The price is that every asker sees every result and filters by correlation, which is cheap against a builder never needing that permission. And every result is kept, failures included, because one that leaves no trace is indistinguishable from a build nobody asked for. That is what a builds view reads; the board page is corrected to say so.
2.9 KiB
layer, status, code, updated, decisions
| layer | status | code | updated | decisions | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| to-be | designed | 2026-08-30 |
|
A board
A place to see the mesh. Read from a survey of the one that exists, so what is proposed here is a shorter list than what is there, deliberately.
What the existing board does, and what of it belongs here
Eight sections. Four are about work and workers and are held back with the rest of that domain; the other four are about the mesh itself.
| what it shows | where it stands here | |
|---|---|---|
| the mesh | every node, what each runs, what each takes from another, module versions | everything behind it exists — it is a reader, not a second source |
| builds | a build, its stages, its log | everything behind it exists — every result is kept, failures included |
| sessions | model sessions, their usage, and switching between accounts | ADR 0024 |
| channels | nodes messaging each other | the agent layer |
The constraint that matters, and it is not a feature
The existing board is one service that reads every context's database. It joins nodes to provisions to modules to sessions by querying each store directly, because that is the shortest path to a page that shows all of them at once.
That is ADR 0008 violated by the one component with a reason to violate it, and the cost is not hypothetical — it is the same cost the shared library has: a boundary nothing may cross is a boundary that can move; one thing crossing it is enough to freeze it. A board that reads the provisioning tables directly is a board that breaks when provisioning changes its tables, and the change then gets weighed against the board.
So a board reads through interfaces and holds nothing. Everything on the mesh page above is
already answerable by asking the control plane — what nodes exist, what each resolves to, what it
takes from elsewhere, which module came from which commit. A board that asks those questions is a
client. A board that queries inventory is a second control plane with a worse contract.
It stores nothing of its own. No cache that can disagree, no table of "what the mesh looked like last time". If a question is slow to answer, the answer belongs in the context that owns it, where everything else asking gets it too.
What it is not
- Not the way to change things. Reading is the whole of it to begin with. Every action the board could offer already exists as a command, and a button that does something no command does is a second implementation of a decision.
- Not a dashboard of graphs. What a person needs from a mesh is which machine is not doing what it was told, and that is a list, not a chart.