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.
59 lines
3.4 KiB
Markdown
59 lines
3.4 KiB
Markdown
---
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status: resolved
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opened: 2026-09-10
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located-in: []
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fixed-by: mesh-host cmd/mesh-bootstrap (ADR 0067); mesh-lab genesis.ts is the one description of genesis both beds call. Still open: a running mesh cannot say it was raised by the installer
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amended-design:
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---
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# 040 — The only description of how a mesh is stood up is a test
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## Symptom
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There is no installer. The one complete, executable account of how a mesh comes into existence is
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an **integration test** in the lab repository: it builds the images, applies the substrate, enrols
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every node, places the overlay, seeds the operator's secrets, registers modules, assigns them,
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pushes, and waits for convergence.
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Nothing else does this. `packaging/` installs and supervises the **host agent** on one machine.
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[`04-lab-installation`](../../03-DESIGN/01-to-be/04-lab-installation.md) covers the **lab's own**
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prerequisites — a virtualisation daemon, storage, a pool. Neither installs a mesh, and no design
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section describes doing so.
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## Why this matters
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**A test fixture is allowed to invent what it needs, and this one did.** It raised an image
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registry that exists in no production, stocked it from a workstation, and rewrote every image
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reference in every manifest to point at it. That single convenience concealed at least two separate
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faults for as long as the lab has existed:
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- modules naming a tag where a digest is required, never caught because the harness was assigning
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the digests ([039](../039-the-lab-registry-was-silently-pinning-unpinned-modules/00-report.md))
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- the bootstrap itself having **no path at all** on a machine that is not the lab: the mesh's own
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control-plane image exists in no registry, so nothing could name it, and the fixture's registry
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was the only reason that never surfaced
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**So the bed being green said nothing about whether a mesh could be installed.** Both are the same
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fault: the procedure and the reality drift, and the drift is invisible precisely because the thing
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that would notice is the thing doing the inventing.
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**And a person cannot run it.** The procedure is expressed as assertions in a test runner, in a
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repository whose purpose is to raise disposable virtual machines. Somebody standing up a real first
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node has no artefact to use — which is why standing one up has been "a person driving the CLI",
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the loop [ADR 0010](../../02-DECISIONS/0010-delivery.md) removed everywhere else and left here.
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## Open questions
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- Where should the procedure live so that **the lab uses it rather than reimplementing it**? The
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lab must remain able to raise machines and inject faults; what it should not be able to do is
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describe installation differently from the thing an operator runs.
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- What is the smallest arrangement that makes drift *impossible* rather than merely discouraged —
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the bed invoking the installer, or something generating one from the other? A second description
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that is merely kept in step is the arrangement that just failed.
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- Which parts of what the test does are genuinely lab-only — documentation addresses, names that
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resolve nowhere, injected faults — and which are the mesh's own and belong in an installer? The
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distinction has never been drawn, and everything landed on the lab side of it by default.
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- How is *"the installer is what installed this"* checked afterwards, on a mesh that is already
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running? A mesh cannot say how it was raised, so nothing can currently contradict a claim that it
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was raised the supported way.
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