jschoubben
f140303257
Three decisions, all Jochen's, and the first is the one that unlocked it. Exclusivity is not a property of a module. It is a property of a singular resource the module takes over. Two shells compete for nothing and any number may be installed; two display servers both want the seat. So a module declares what it CLAIMS, and two modules claiming the same thing cannot both be assigned within that claim's scope. Not "xorg conflicts with wayland". Pairwise exclusion has a property that only shows up later: adding a third display server means editing xorg and wayland to know about it. Every new module requires changing modules nobody who wrote it owns, and the edits grow as the square of the count. With a claim the third one says what it claims and nothing else changes anywhere. Claims have a scope -- node, site, mesh -- which is not new. The mesh already enforces exactly one hub with a unique index. Scope is that idea said once rather than hard-coded per case. And some conflicts need no claim at all: two modules declaring the same file or binding the same port are visible from what they declare. A claim is only written for the abstract ones. A requirement with several answers is refused, never guessed. One candidate is assigned silently because there was no choice to make; none is refused naming what is missing; several is refused naming them. That is what makes a solver unnecessary -- counting candidates has no surprising behaviour, and a solver can be added later without changing a single manifest. Flavor is retired. It was carrying three unrelated meanings: variants of a thing, a subset of a module a node installs, and whatever the current system does, which earned two knowledge-base entries about going wrong. A word with three meanings cannot be reasoned about. What it reached for is two ordinary things -- different modules providing the same thing, and one module with a setting.
03-DESIGN
The authoritative specification. Implementation is built against what is written here.
Two layers
| Folder | What it is |
|---|---|
00-as-is/ |
The mesh that exists today. Shipped behaviour, described as it is — including behaviour nobody would choose again. |
01-to-be/ |
The mesh being built toward. Every statement traceable to a record in 02-DECISIONS/. |
They are never mixed. A statement about the future does not belong in an as-is document, and an as-is document is never edited to describe an intention.
When a to-be design ships, it does not move. Its as-is counterpart is written or updated,
the to-be document's status becomes implemented, and both stand — one describing what runs,
the other recording what was intended. Deleting the intention loses the reasoning, which is
the expensive half.
Frontmatter
Every design document (not the READMEs) carries:
---
layer: as-is | to-be
status: designed | in-progress | implemented | abandoned
code: [] # owning code repo(s), from 00-META/repos.md
updated: YYYY-MM-DD # date of the last status change, not of text edits
decisions: [] # 02-DECISIONS/ records this document rests on
---
For an as-is document, status: implemented is the normal state — it describes something that
runs — and code: names where that implementation lives.
Status changes when implementation state changes, never because design text was edited. An
implemented claim must be defensible from the owning repository's main branch, not from
intent. If it cannot be checked, it is in-progress.
Cross-cutting views are generated from this frontmatter by the hq-status skill and never
written to disk.
What belongs here
Functional analysis, architectural description, and specification — prose and diagrams
only, no code. A manifest field may be named; a manifest may not be pasted. A document
enters the to-be layer only after the decision behind it is recorded in 02-DECISIONS/
and the research that produced it is closed.
Subfolders are encouraged where a layer grows enough to need them.