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.
04-ISSUES
The front door for "something is wrong" at the level of the mesh's design or governance. Diagnosis happens here, where the whole mesh is in view; the fix lands in the owning code repository.
What belongs here
| Belongs here | Belongs in the knowledge base |
|---|---|
| The design permits a failure to be silent | How to fix one occurrence of it |
| A documented rule is enforced by nothing | A command that works around it |
| A stated invariant is false in practice | A node-specific quirk |
| The owner is unknown and finding it needs the whole mesh in view | Symptom → fix, once the answer is known |
The knowledge base already holds the operational record and is indexed on symptoms. This folder is not a second copy of it. An issue here is a question HQ must answer; an entry there is an incident someone must clear. An issue whose answer is a general lesson belongs in both.
Structure
NNN-short-name/
00-report.md the symptom as observed, with the evidence; status in frontmatter
01-diagnosis.md the investigation trail, dated, including what was ruled out
Frontmatter, on 00-report.md
---
status: open | diagnosing | located | resolved | wontfix
opened: YYYY-MM-DD
located-in: [] # owning repo(s) or module(s), filled by diagnosis
fixed-by: # pull request or commit reference, filled at resolution
amended-design: # design doc path, when the root cause was a design gap
---
Rules
- Anyone may open an issue. No localisation is required to report one.
- The full flow is playbook
00-META/process/03-issues.md. - Closed issues are never deleted — they are the mesh's symptom-to-component memory.
wontfixis legitimate and requires a sentence saying why.