jschoubben
61f61b5d06
An audit of the six code repositories found eleven open issues fixed on main with commits and beds to show (025, 027, 033, 036, 037, 040, 045, 047, 050, 052, 053), three partly (007, 026, 035), nine not (020, 031, 041, 046, 049, 054, 064, 065, 066) and one whose fix would live outside those repos (006). Resolved ones name their evidence; partly ones say what remains; 041 records that the exposure has widened since it was reported.
49 lines
2.6 KiB
Markdown
49 lines
2.6 KiB
Markdown
---
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status: open
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opened: 2026-09-02
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located-in: []
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fixed-by: partly — mesh-host 24e9ae4 (a run-once step writes a seed only if absent, ADR 0052); mesh-catalog ec1e718 (mosquitto). A file resource itself has no create-once semantic, and no bed asserts a seed's grown content survives a re-apply
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amended-design:
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---
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# 035 — Reconciling a seed file wipes what grew in it
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## The symptom, as observed
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Found by review of the catalogue examples (2026-09-02), not by an outage — the outage is the
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part the design permits to be silent.
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The cache module declares its access-control file as an ordinary file resource with fixed,
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empty content. The program that consumes the file requires it to exist at startup, which is
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why the manifest declares it at all. But the same file is the one the provisioner writes
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consumer users into, and the one the running program persists ACL changes back to.
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A declaration is complete for what the host owns, and the host reconciles what is declared
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([ADR 0010](../../02-DECISIONS/0010-delivery.md)).
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So every apply that revisits this resource restores the declared content — empty — behind the
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running program. Every consumer credential granted since the last apply is removed, the apply
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reports success, and nothing anywhere says a grant vanished.
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## Why it matters beyond the instance
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The manifest needed *the file to exist before first start*, and the only vocabulary available
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was *the file has this content, forever*. Those are different intentions, and the gap between
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them is generic: any resource that a module seeds and something else then legitimately mutates
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— an ACL file, a bootstrap configuration a program rewrites, an htpasswd a provisioner appends
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to — has the same two owners and the same silent loss on reconcile.
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It is also the mirror image of the boundary ADR 0010 draws so carefully on the *removal* side:
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the host never removes what it did not create, but it happily overwrites what it *did* create,
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even when what grew inside since is somebody else's work the mesh asked for.
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## Open questions
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- Is the missing thing a create-once file semantic ("present with this content if absent,
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untouched otherwise"), or is the real fault that two owners share one file — and the
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provisioner, not the declaration, should own it entirely, with first-start ordering solved
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some other way?
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- ADR 0010 treats every added resource type as a security artefact. Does a create-once
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semantic widen what a compromised control plane can express, or narrow it?
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- Are there other seeded-then-mutated files already in the catalogue that this failure is
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waiting inside?
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