Files
hq/01-RESEARCH/002-local-mesh/00-overview.md
T
jschoubben c0b35652d0 The numbering is the flow: decisions are 02, design is 03
papa-hq reads 01 research -> 03 decision -> 02 design. The order is a
scar, not a choice: 02-DESIGN existed from its initial commit, and when
adr/ was finally promoted on 2026-07-13 it took the next free number
rather than its place in the sequence. By then design was too settled to
renumber.

hal-hq was three commits old, so it is not. adr/ becomes 02-DECISIONS and
02-DESIGN becomes 03-DESIGN, and following the folder numbers now walks
the process in the order it happens: research produces a decision, the
decision authorises a design.

00-GENESIS becomes 00-META, matching papa's rename from the same
restructure.

Every path reference rewritten across documents, frontmatter, playbooks
and skills. All links resolve; all 58 frontmatter blocks parse and their
path fields still point at files that exist.
2026-08-23 18:05:11 +02:00

2.9 KiB

status, initiated, touches, became
status initiated touches became
graduated 2026-08-22
03-DESIGN/00-as-is/04-delivery.md
03-DESIGN/00-as-is/05-runtime-and-installation.md
03-DESIGN/01-to-be/01-end-to-end-testing.md
02-DECISIONS/0016-a-lab-node-is-a-virtual-machine.md

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 in modules/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.