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hq/01-RESEARCH/002-local-mesh/00-overview.md
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jschoubben 333356cff3 Order the records the way the system is learned
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.
2026-08-28 23:30:42 +02:00

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---
status: graduated
initiated: 2026-08-22
touches: [03-DESIGN/00-as-is/04-delivery.md, 03-DESIGN/00-as-is/05-runtime-and-installation.md]
became: [03-DESIGN/01-to-be/01-end-to-end-testing.md, 02-DECISIONS/0016-the-lab.md]
---
# 002 — A mesh that runs locally
- **Initiated by:** jochen, 2026-08-22
- **Areas touched:** `install.d/`, `hal/meshware`, `hal/coordinator`, `hal/brain`,
`hal/developer` (`dev_up`), `hal/sdk` (env generation, feature handlers, artifact
manager), `test/pipeline/`, `test/dev-mesh/`, the provisioning path in
`modules/postgres/`.
## Summary
Phase 0 of [`03-DESIGN/00-work-breakdown.md`](../../03-DESIGN/01-to-be/00-work-breakdown.md) requires
a mesh that comes up in containers, runs its own pipeline, and reproduces known faults on
demand. Nothing else in the decomposition starts until it exists, because every fault the
decomposition addresses was found in production — there was nowhere else to find it.
This effort establishes what already runs in a container, what is welded to the host, and
what it would take to close the gap. It does **not** choose an approach: the central
question — how a containerised node executes a module service, when a module service is
defined today as a systemd unit shelling to `docker compose` in `/services/` — is not
answered by ADR 0001 and is recorded below rather than decided.
## What was established
- The two existing container harnesses are **neither of them a mesh**, and one of them has
not been able to build since 2026-06-04.
- Node identity is already portable — a single environment variable, no host handshake.
- Four concrete host couplings block a containerised node, all with known locations.
- All three Phase 0 fixtures are reproducible; one of them is documented in the knowledge
base with an open root cause and is the cheapest place to start.
Detail and evidence in [`analysis.md`](analysis.md).
## Questions — all settled 2026-08-22
**Phase 0 is a development environment**, not a fixture rig — it is what the host-borrowing
dev tooling becomes.
**The trigger is a real source-forge container**, because the webhook relay is part of what
is under test.
**A node is a system container**, promotable to a virtual machine per node. This answered
the question the effort was stuck on, and dissolved it rather than solving it: against a
real node with a real init, the four host couplings catalogued in `analysis.md` §3 are not
couplings — they are how a node works. They were obstacles only to a node modelled as an
application container.
Consequently [`003-service-supervision`](../003-service-supervision/) **no longer blocks
Phase 0**. It remains a live architecture question, on its own timeline.
The remaining questions in `analysis.md` — what replaces host paths in a container, and how
faithful the lab must be — are answered in the design: nothing replaces them, because the
paths are real; and the divergences are enumerated rather than discovered.