jschoubben
42bce02bba
The skeleton's biggest unproven claim was that absorbing six concerns makes a binary whose whole argument is having no dependencies carry six of them. Measured against origin/main, and the question turns out to ask about the wrong axis. By size the absorption is SMALLER than the machinery that already applies state on a node — 2755 lines of adapters against 3059 lines of meshware, env-sync and config-sync. The host is not a new large thing; it already exists, spread across three core modules. The real risk is direction, and it is two modules wide rather than six concerns wide. Eight of ten adapters already receive derived state and only apply it, so absorbing them moves code that has no dependency to move. Two — wireguard and traefik — open a Postgres connection to the control plane and compute their own configuration, which inside tier 0 would be an upward dependency and is exactly what the tier rule forbids. And the split has already been happening without being named: dnsmasq-app needs the same node data as wireguard and does not query for it, because hand- duplicated state went wrong and someone derived it centrally instead. Eight of ten adapters are on the far side of that migration. So the absorption is not a move, it is a split: deciding stays in tier 2, applying goes to tier 0. The claim survives with its scope corrected — the host carries ONE concern, apply declared state on this machine, of which the six are instances. Stated open rather than glossed: the two unsplit modules are the two hardest, six concerns is still six vocabularies even at zero dependencies, and what the host must carry versus find is issue 007 and unresolved. Question B also recorded as answered by the operator — a node is a managed machine, and a disconnected node is still a node in a different situation. The question posed a class distinction; there is none, and what varies is state.
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.