jschoubben
902739acb6
The proposal to split modules into provisioning services and applications was worked through and abandoned, for a reason worth keeping: it cannot be filed consistently. A git forge is consumed as a service and operated through a web interface; an analytics service grants tracking identity and is a dashboard. The operator's correction is the sharper form — what runs on the machine is a supervised container, not something a user started. That is a fact about HOW a thing runs, not about what kind of thing it is. So it is a facet, and 0002 survives: everything is a module. What the catalogue is missing is not a taxonomy but a graph. Grouping asserts relationships; a graph records them. Five declarations, of which two exist: requires/provides a resource (yes), requires/excludes another module (no), requires a node capability (no). Plus interface modules that carry no implementation, with adapters providing them. Recorded because it matters: this is a package manager's model, and pacman already has all of it — depends, conflicts, and provides as virtual packages, which is exactly the interface/adapter idea. Arriving there independently is evidence for the shape. It is also a warning about what not to reimplement. Working position on capabilities, to be tested: intrinsic ones (hardware, architecture, network position) are detected and never installed, and a module requiring one it lacks is impossible rather than unresolved. Provided ones (a display server, a container runtime) are not a separate kind of thing — they are modules that provide a capability, so "may the mesh install a capability" is not policy, it is dependency resolution. Issue 007 then bears directly: an installed package is not a capability. Also captured: the operator's assessment that the machinery around a module — scheduled tasks, hooks, migrations, config and env — is worth keeping, seeds are not, and the integration is wrong enough to need a major refactor. Research 005 found supporting evidence from another direction, that the densest apparent coupling in the catalogue is manifest boilerplate churn. The first open question is the one that decides whether this is progress: what does the graph DELETE? If modules gain declarations and lose nothing, it is motion.
01-RESEARCH
Investigations that have not yet hardened into design.
Structure
Each effort lives in NNN-descriptive-name/ and must contain 00-overview.md, carrying its
state in YAML frontmatter and a prose summary below it:
---
status: active | graduated | abandoned
initiated: YYYY-MM-DD
touches: [] # design docs, subsystems or areas the effort bears on
became: [] # required when status is terminal — what it turned into
---
The prose says what is being investigated, why, and what it touches. It does not restate the status — status lives in one place, and two places is one too many.
Further documents in the same folder hold the work itself: notes, evidence, option analyses, draft designs.
Lifecycle
| status | Meaning |
|---|---|
active |
Investigation in progress. |
graduated |
Checked against 00-META, decided in 02-DECISIONS/, and specified in 03-DESIGN — see became:. |
abandoned |
Stopped or superseded. Nothing is deleted. |
An effort graduates by producing a decision record and a 03-DESIGN entry. It is abandoned
in place — never deleted. What was rejected, and why, is the more expensive half to
rediscover.
Starting and closing efforts is playbook territory:
00-META/process/01-research.md and
02-graduation.md.
Rules
- Markdown only. Do not skip or reuse a sequence number.
- Evidence, not assertion. An effort that measured nothing has not finished.
- Research describes real observations but never identifies the mesh it observed. The shape of a finding survives anonymisation intact.