jschoubben
5e83ac2c22
Jochen: a normal application has 3-5 ADRs, maybe 10 for a large one, and we are at 65. Fair, and the cause is mine -- I recorded every FINDING as a decision rather than every fork in the road. Two merges, both cases where one decision had been split across many records because it was taken over several days rather than at once. 0019 absorbs ten records about how this repository works: what it is and that it is public, the folder flow, the two design layers, the issue front door, status in frontmatter, playbooks, the naming rule, the product name. Those were never ten decisions -- they were one, seen from ten angles as the repository took shape. 0016 absorbs the five about the lab: a node is a virtual machine, a router is scenery, a scenario declares the underlay, a scenario is a closed address space, and the two scenario classes. Same pattern -- one design, split by the order it was worked out in. The consolidated 0019 also raises the bar for what earns a record, since that is what produced 65: a record is warranted when there is a genuine fork -- a direction reversed, an alternative that will be proposed again, something contested. A finding is not a decision, and a bug is certainly not. Everything else belongs in the design document where the reasoning is actually read. The checker earned its place here. Deleting nine records left 13 dangling links across the repository and it named every one, including in AGENTS.md. Nothing was found by reading. Remaining clusters worth the same treatment: the host (8 records), delivery (5), modules (6), connectivity (4), substrate and control plane (4). That would be 52 down to roughly 30.
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status, initiated, touches, became
| status | initiated | touches | became | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| graduated | 2026-08-22 |
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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 inmodules/postgres/.
Summary
Phase 0 of 03-DESIGN/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 0015 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.
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 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.