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.
jschoubben
902739acb6