jschoubben
2bbdc52440
The refusal landed, and the examples pin images that exist. What is still missing is the part that makes it unnecessary: nothing in the mesh turns a tag into a digest, so it was done by hand — which is precisely what the issue says a person should not be asked to do. Recorded because the resolution mechanism turned out to be trivial: asking a registry what a tag points at takes about a second and pulls nothing. That removes the main argument for leaving this open. Also records the two faults that fell out of pinning for real. The mail system named seven repositories that do not exist, because it publishes to a different registry than the manifest assumed, and one of the seven had been renamed upstream. Nothing checking only the shape of a reference could have found either.
4.7 KiB
status, opened, located-in, fixed-by, amended-design
| status | opened | located-in | fixed-by | amended-design | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| located | 2026-09-01 |
|
partly — mesh-control ee3cc1b |
025 — A module must pin a digest, and nothing produces one
Symptom
Every image reference in every example module is sixty-four zeros:
gitea@sha256:0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
Eighteen of them, across five modules. Each one parses, resolves, and composes into a declaration
a host accepts. None of them could ever start: the machine would reach docker pull and stop.
This is why those modules are written and not running, and it was not visible from any check because every check passes.
Why nothing caught it
The host validates the shape of a reference and nothing else — that it is name@sha256: plus
sixty-four hexadecimal characters. Sixty-four zeros satisfies that exactly.
That check is not wrong. A host cannot verify a digest exists without reaching a registry, and reaching a registry is precisely what the design refuses to make it do (ADR 0006). The host is the last place that could catch this and the wrong place to try.
The actual gap
A manifest must carry a digest, and nothing in the system produces one.
- Images the mesh builds are fine: the bundle writes the digest down after building, which is the whole reason the bundle exists in that shape.
- Images from anywhere else — a forge, a mail system, a database — have no path at all. Somebody
has to look up what
gitea:1.22points at today and paste it in, and nothing re-checks it.
So the design is coherent about pinning and silent about where a pin comes from. A person writing a module is asked for something they cannot reasonably produce by hand, and given a placeholder shape that passes every gate.
What a fix has to keep
- The host still refuses a tag. A digest is what makes a declaration exact, and that must not soften. The fix belongs where a module is added or built, not on the machine.
- A person writes a tag; the mesh holds a digest. A manifest in a repository naming
gitea:1.22is readable and reviewable; the mesh resolving that against a registry once, and recording the answer, is what makes it exact. The module table already records this shape for source repositories — where it came from, the branch followed, the commit read — and an image is the same question asked of a registry. - Re-resolving is a decision, not a side effect. A tag that moves must not silently change what a machine runs. Whatever resolves it records both, so this pin is behind its tag is a question the mesh can answer rather than something discovered on a restart.
Cheaply, now
An all-zero digest is a placeholder and never a real image. Refusing it costs three lines and would have caught all eighteen the day they were written. It does not fix the gap; it stops the gap being invisible.
What this blocks
Every module that names a third-party image, which is every module that is not the mesh itself. The forge and the mail system are otherwise ready to run.
Half of it is done
A placeholder can no longer reach a machine. The refusal sits where a declaration is composed, not where a manifest is parsed — a file awaiting a pin is legitimate, and the design already says so for artifacts the mesh builds. Composing is the last moment before a machine sees it.
The examples now pin images that exist. Twelve third-party digests were resolved against their
registries without pulling anything, which is also the mechanism the rest of this issue needs:
docker manifest inspect --verbose answers what does this tag point at in about a second.
Two faults came free, and both had been invisible for the same reason as the digests: the mail system's seven images named repositories that do not exist — it publishes to a different registry entirely — and one of the seven had been renamed upstream. Nothing that only checks the shape of a reference could ever have found either.
What is still open
Nothing turns a tag into a digest as part of the mesh's own work. It was done by hand here, which is exactly what this issue says a person should not be asked to do. The shape of the answer is unchanged: a person writes a tag, the mesh resolves it once and records both, and this pin is behind its tag becomes a question the mesh can answer.
The mesh's own provisioner images still cannot be pinned in a repository, because their digest does not exist until they are built and pushed. That is the bundle's problem, and the bundle solves it by writing the digest down after building. A module naming an image the mesh builds needs the same treatment, and does not have it.