Stage 2 could not start without it. Three constraints already bound the shape and between them they decide most of it. JSON, because the standard library carries it and carries no YAML, and a YAML declaration would put a third-party parser inside the one binary whose whole argument is that it needs nothing — to gain authoring comfort in a document generated by a machine and read by a machine. An ordered list, because ordering is a DECISION. A host deriving order from declared dependencies would be deciding the thing most likely to differ between what the control plane intended and what the machine does. The control plane knows what depends on what; it says so by saying when. Unknown is refused, never skipped — an unknown version, type or field refuses the whole declaration. A host that skipped what it did not understand would apply most of a declaration and report success, which is 04-ISSUES/003 with the declaration on the other side of the wire. Complete for what the host OWNS, and only that. It removes what it previously applied and is no longer declared, which it knows from the store rather than by inference, and never removes what it did not create — a converger that treats 'not declared' as 'must not exist' deletes what the mesh never put there. Two consequences arriving earlier than the build order suggested: the store is load-bearing at stage 2, because nothing can be removed without knowing what was applied. And a closed address space bounds the first vocabulary to what needs no network, because a scenario has no route to a package repository.
03-DESIGN / 01-to-be
The mesh being built toward. Every statement here traces to a record in
02-DECISIONS/; nothing arrives by drafting.
A document here describes an intention. What currently runs is in
00-as-is/, and the two are never merged — when something ships, the as-is
document is written and this one's status becomes implemented.
| Document | Covers | Rests on |
|---|---|---|
00-work-breakdown.md |
How the decomposition gets built, in what order, and where a human must look | ADR 0015 |
01-end-to-end-testing.md |
The lab: a real mesh a change can be run against before it reaches nodes | ADR 0016, 0029 |
02-scenario-declaration.md |
What a scenario declares — the underlay, and what to place on it | ADR 0031 |
03-scenario-lifecycle.md |
What happens to a scenario — raise, snapshot, restore, move, destroy | ADR 0032 |
04-lab-installation.md |
Getting the lab onto a clean machine, and why it verifies capability rather than installation | ADR 0008 |
05-the-node-host.md |
Tier 0 — the one thing installed by hand, and the only thing that changes a machine | ADR 0037 |
Not yet written
- The eight bounded contexts. ADR 0015 decides the decomposition; the per-context specifications do not exist yet. The work breakdown says in what order they are needed.
- Domain grouping outside the core. ADR 0017 settles the principle and explicitly does not settle the domain list. That is a research effort, not a design document, until it concludes.