jschoubben
50d61398b6
Supersedes ADR 0030's 'types, not behaviour' line for mesh-sdk. The boundary is change-frequency, not kind: the SDK holds the stable spine (tool-serving harness, messaging/event framework, contracts, core primitives) and refuses per-module clients, per-module tool code, and anything volatile — because those are what turned hal/sdk into constant maintenance and made every edit rebuild every module. States the rule (frequent AND cascading is the disease), why the root cause was intra-module feature-sharing leaking into inter-module coupling, and where per-module shared code lives instead (in the module — a shared file, or a module-local sdk for the few large ones). Updates repos.md's canonical mesh-sdk description to match; leaves 0030 untouched (immutable). Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LrgweAeERJYBg88c5cKDzF
4.2 KiB
status, updated
| status | updated |
|---|---|
| canonical | 2026-08-23 |
The Novox repositories
The map of where implementation lives. Humans use it for orientation; agents use it for issue
triage (playbook process/03-issues.md). The code: frontmatter
field in design documents points at entries here.
Repository names are recorded; hosts, URLs and owners are not — this repository is public,
and a forge address is an operational detail (see README).
| Repository | Owns |
|---|---|
hal |
The monorepo — the node runtime, the module catalogue, the delivery machinery, and the bootstrap scripts. Every core module lives here. |
hq |
This repository, under the company organisation — mission, research, design, decisions, issue diagnosis. Company-scoped (ADR 0028); the mesh is its first product. The source of truth for why. Carries no implementation. |
| (one per application) | Every standalone application, site or side-project gets its own repository, with module.yml at the root. Registered with the mesh as a build source; built and deployed by the same pipeline as anything in the monorepo. |
What the mesh becomes
ADR 0030 records the repositories the
monorepo decomposes into. mesh-lab and mesh-host exist so far — the lab is built first
(ADR 0029); the rest are the
target, not the present.
| Repository | Tier | Holds |
|---|---|---|
mesh-host |
0 | exists. The node host — one statically linked binary, requiring nothing present (ADR 0041) |
mesh-substrate |
1 | the four pinned services, as declarations |
mesh-control |
2 | the control plane and its contexts |
mesh-surfaces |
3 | tools, web, cli |
mesh-sdk |
— | the stable spine modules build against — the tool-serving harness, the messaging/event framework, the contracts and core primitives. Holds nothing per-module and nothing volatile (ADR 0044). |
mesh-lab |
— | exists. The lab — scenario lifecycle, networking, placement. Ships to nobody; runs on a workstation. |
Tier 4's shape is open, and deliberately so: see ADR 0030 and research 005.
What lives where inside the monorepo
Named by role, because the layout is itself part of the as-is design — see
03-DESIGN/00-as-is/.
| Area | Holds |
|---|---|
| Module catalogue | One directory per module, each with a manifest. Core modules sit under the mesh's own namespace; everything else at the top level. |
| Node runtime | The daemon and interactive runtime that every node runs. |
| Bootstrap scripts | First-node initialisation, joining an existing mesh, and node rescue. |
| Shared library | The SDK every module builds against. |
| Pipeline test harness | End-to-end coverage of the delivery pipeline. Currently unbuildable — see 04-ISSUES/005. |
Why applications do not live in the monorepo
A standalone application in the monorepo is a convention violation, and reviewers reject it.
The reasoning is recorded in 02-DECISIONS/0010:
the mesh installs, provisions for, and ships an application through exactly the same machinery
whether or not its source sits beside the mesh's own — so co-location buys nothing and costs
the monorepo's review cadence.
There is no npm workspace
Each module is a standalone package that consumes its dependencies from the private registry,
not from a sibling directory. The workspace was removed after it caused build-versus-development
divergence — a workspace member importing another resolved to local unbuilt source in the
pipeline and to a published version in development. Recorded in
02-DECISIONS/0007.
Consequence, and it is a real one: a cross-package change is two steps — publish, then consume
— and a repository-wide npm install does not exist.