jschoubben
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What the mesh is, what it is becoming, and why. Implementation lives in the code repositories; the reasoning lives here. 00-GENESIS mission, engineering context, effect, and the rules that hold 01-RESEARCH investigations, before they harden into design 02-DESIGN the authoritative specification adr numbered decisions — what was chosen, and what was rejected DECISIONS.md the ledger: every decision, in the order it was taken Written for a reader who is not its author and has no access to the mesh it describes. Addresses use the documentation ranges of RFC 5737 and RFC 1918; nodes are named by role. Single initial commit by intent. The prior history came from a private repository and carried operational detail — a routable address identified as a VPN hub, real domain names, a hosting provider — which sanitising a tip commit would not have removed from the log.
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002 — A mesh that runs locally
- Status: GRADUATED — the design is
02-DESIGN/01-end-to-end-testing.md - Initiated by: jochen, 2026-08-22
- Areas touched:
install.d/,hal/meshware,hal/coordinator,hal/brain,hal/developer(dev_up),hal/sdk(env generation, feature handlers, artifact manager),test/pipeline/,test/dev-mesh/, the provisioning path inmodules/postgres/.
Summary
Phase 0 of 02-DESIGN/00-work-breakdown.md requires
a mesh that comes up in containers, runs its own pipeline, and reproduces known faults on
demand. Nothing else in the decomposition starts until it exists, because every fault the
decomposition addresses was found in production — there was nowhere else to find it.
This effort establishes what already runs in a container, what is welded to the host, and
what it would take to close the gap. It does not choose an approach: the central
question — how a containerised node executes a module service, when a module service is
defined today as a systemd unit shelling to docker compose in /services/ — is not
answered by ADR 0001 and is recorded below rather than decided.
What was established
- The two existing container harnesses are neither of them a mesh, and one of them has not been able to build since 2026-06-04.
- Node identity is already portable — a single environment variable, no host handshake.
- Four concrete host couplings block a containerised node, all with known locations.
- All three Phase 0 fixtures are reproducible; one of them is documented in the knowledge base with an open root cause and is the cheapest place to start.
Detail and evidence in analysis.md.
Questions — all settled 2026-08-22
Phase 0 is a development environment, not a fixture rig — it is what the host-borrowing dev tooling becomes.
The trigger is a real source-forge container, because the webhook relay is part of what is under test.
A node is a system container, promotable to a virtual machine per node. This answered
the question the effort was stuck on, and dissolved it rather than solving it: against a
real node with a real init, the four host couplings catalogued in analysis.md §3 are not
couplings — they are how a node works. They were obstacles only to a node modelled as an
application container.
Consequently 003-service-supervision no longer blocks
Phase 0. It remains a live architecture question, on its own timeline.
The remaining questions in analysis.md — what replaces host paths in a container, and how
faithful the lab must be — are answered in the design: nothing replaces them, because the
paths are real; and the divergences are enumerated rather than discovered.