0060 -- the host is built per operating system. systemd and pacman are the Arch host's implementation, not abstractions the mesh has to grow. They are not independent choices: a machine has pacman because it is Arch, and the package manager, service manager and packaging format arrive together as one decision somebody made at install time. Rejected abstracting them, and the reason is correctness rather than effort. The service applier reads LoadState to tell "not installed" apart from "stopped", which is what stops it reporting absence as success. An interface spanning systemd and OpenRC degrades to what both express, and the lowest common denominator is exactly where that fault lives. Almost all of it is shared -- the vocabulary, store, apply loop, read-back discipline, refusal model, bundle and link are portable. Two appliers differ. And delivery was already per-OS, since a .pkg.tar.zst is an Arch artifact, so this is the seam that already existed. Android is the interesting case rather than Debian: no service manager, no package installation, usually no root. Such a host implements file, directory and action and refuses the rest -- the same refusal a host already gives an unknown type, with a different reason. Those three are the portable floor. The container runtime is deliberately left open: it is not an OS split, since Arch runs docker or podman. 0061 -- the init is asked for start-at-boot and restart-on-exit, and nothing else. Both are expressible in OpenRC, runit, s6 and an Android init.rc. Counting failed starts and rolling back moves into a launcher, because that is the one piece which must work when the host does not, and a script with a counter can be tested where OnFailure= can only be hoped for. Supersedes 0059, keeping its reasoning in full. The checker found all six places citing 0059 and refused the commit until they named the replacement.
03-DESIGN
The authoritative specification. Implementation is built against what is written here.
Two layers
| Folder | What it is |
|---|---|
00-as-is/ |
The mesh that exists today. Shipped behaviour, described as it is — including behaviour nobody would choose again. |
01-to-be/ |
The mesh being built toward. Every statement traceable to a record in 02-DECISIONS/. |
They are never mixed. A statement about the future does not belong in an as-is document, and an as-is document is never edited to describe an intention.
When a to-be design ships, it does not move. Its as-is counterpart is written or updated,
the to-be document's status becomes implemented, and both stand — one describing what runs,
the other recording what was intended. Deleting the intention loses the reasoning, which is
the expensive half.
Frontmatter
Every design document (not the READMEs) carries:
---
layer: as-is | to-be
status: designed | in-progress | implemented | abandoned
code: [] # owning code repo(s), from 00-META/repos.md
updated: YYYY-MM-DD # date of the last status change, not of text edits
decisions: [] # 02-DECISIONS/ records this document rests on
---
For an as-is document, status: implemented is the normal state — it describes something that
runs — and code: names where that implementation lives.
Status changes when implementation state changes, never because design text was edited. An
implemented claim must be defensible from the owning repository's main branch, not from
intent. If it cannot be checked, it is in-progress.
Cross-cutting views are generated from this frontmatter by the hq-status skill and never
written to disk.
What belongs here
Functional analysis, architectural description, and specification — prose and diagrams
only, no code. A manifest field may be named; a manifest may not be pasted. A document
enters the to-be layer only after the decision behind it is recorded in 02-DECISIONS/
and the research that produced it is closed.
Subfolders are encouraged where a layer grows enough to need them.