jschoubben
c9c2dfe686
The operator wants features gone, and 006 left it open. Measured, and the answer is that nothing replaces them because they were never one concept. A feature is a kind of content a module carries, detected from its directory: twenty-one of them, each with a handler owning six stages — build, publish, install, configure, start, verify. The structural finding: EVERY handler implements EVERY stage. `configs` writes files onto a node, has nothing to build, and has a build stage. `npm` publishes to a registry, has nothing to start, and has a start stage. One interface spans build-time and apply-time, so every kind of content must implement both halves and most do nothing in one — and a stage that does nothing looks exactly like a stage that failed to do anything. They split four ways, across three tiers. Artifacts built once per version and published, where no node is involved — delivery. Resources that are desired state on a machine, which is what ADR 0043 already describes and the host already does — tier 0. Actions run once against something that is not this machine, like a migration against a database on another node — delivery, and seeds go entirely. And checks: the prerequisites are REQUIREMENTS IN DISGUISE, a module saying what must be true before it can be installed, which is what an edge in the graph says; the verifiers are the read-back the host already performs. So `feature` is one word for four things spanning three tiers, which is why the pipeline is hard to reason about. One property must survive the split, and it is the thing the current design got right: content is DETECTED, relationships are DECLARED. A module that says it has migrations and has none is a fault nobody sees until it matters — but what it requires and provides is not visible in a directory and has to be said.
01-RESEARCH
Investigations that have not yet hardened into design.
Structure
Each effort lives in NNN-descriptive-name/ and must contain 00-overview.md, carrying its
state in YAML frontmatter and a prose summary below it:
---
status: active | graduated | abandoned
initiated: YYYY-MM-DD
touches: [] # design docs, subsystems or areas the effort bears on
became: [] # required when status is terminal — what it turned into
---
The prose says what is being investigated, why, and what it touches. It does not restate the status — status lives in one place, and two places is one too many.
Further documents in the same folder hold the work itself: notes, evidence, option analyses, draft designs.
Lifecycle
| status | Meaning |
|---|---|
active |
Investigation in progress. |
graduated |
Checked against 00-META, decided in 02-DECISIONS/, and specified in 03-DESIGN — see became:. |
abandoned |
Stopped or superseded. Nothing is deleted. |
An effort graduates by producing a decision record and a 03-DESIGN entry. It is abandoned
in place — never deleted. What was rejected, and why, is the more expensive half to
rediscover.
Starting and closing efforts is playbook territory:
00-META/process/01-research.md and
02-graduation.md.
Rules
- Markdown only. Do not skip or reuse a sequence number.
- Evidence, not assertion. An effort that measured nothing has not finished.
- Research describes real observations but never identifies the mesh it observed. The shape of a finding survives anonymisation intact.