jschoubben
e1febe8e0f
The consolidation left a sparse sequence -- 1, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10, 12, 15, 16, 18, 19, 25, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40, 42, 44, 45, 48, 49, 58 -- where the gaps were only the archaeology of what used to be there. Renumbered contiguously. Renames run in ascending order, so every target number is already free and no two files ever collide. The reference rewrite is one simultaneous pass rather than a sequence of replacements. Numbers moved into slots other numbers were vacating -- the node host went 37 to 16 while the lab went 16 to 9 -- so replacing one at a time would have cascaded and silently pointed things at the wrong record. Seven plain-text references survived the merges as prose rather than links, naming records that no longer existed: the enrolment token, the link boundary, what a declaration is, reachability, the repository structure. Each mapped to the consolidated record that now holds it. Verified rather than assumed: every [ADR NNNN](path) link now has matching text and target, checked across the whole repository, and the checker passes. Frontmatter `consolidates:` lists dropped -- they named records that are gone, and each consolidated record already says in prose what it absorbed.
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status, initiated, touches, became
| status | initiated | touches | became | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| graduated | 2026-08-23 |
|
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005 — Which domains the catalogue groups into
ADR 0019 settles that modules outside the platform core are grouped by domain rather than by single function, and deliberately does not settle the list. This effort settles the list — and, first, tests whether the premise survives measurement.
What is being investigated
Eighty-nine modules sit outside the platform core. The question is which of them belong together, and the method is evidence rather than intuition: which modules actually change together, measured across the full history of the code repository.
Why
The argument in ADR 0017 is that the catalogue's shape records what was installed rather than what anything is for — that four modules constituting "how a node is reachable" have no relationship the mesh can see, so a change to connectivity is made four times.
That argument is testable. If those modules genuinely change together, the grouping is justified by more than tidiness. If they do not, the premise needs revising before a list is drawn from it.
What it touches
The catalogue's shape, the manifest, and — for one candidate grouping — the provisioning reference itself, since a requirement names a provider module. Grouping providers would change what a consumer names.
Status
Measurement is done and is in analysis.md. It partly contradicts the
premise, in a way that narrows the effort usefully:
- Non-platform modules overwhelmingly change alone — 10% of commits touch more than one, and 50 of 89 never co-change with anything.
- Two clusters do exist. One of them, reachability, holds up as a domain.
- The other, the provisioned infrastructure providers, co-changes for a reason that argues against grouping rather than for it.
The remaining work is the list itself, for the modules where grouping is justified, plus the open questions below.
What it became
Closed 2026-08-28. Three of the four questions are answered, and by records that did not cite this effort — which is why it stayed open after being resolved.
Whether provider modules group at all — no.
ADR 0019:
there is no networking thing to install, there are concrete modules named individually. Folders
assert relationships; edges record them. Provider stops being a category at the same time.
Whether "group or leave" is even the right pair of options — it was not, and that is the useful finding. ADR 0019 reframes it: things that change together share an authority, not a package. This effort's own measurement is what that record rests on — reachability being the only place modules genuinely co-change is why connectivity is a context and why nothing else needed one.
What to do with the ~50 modules that co-change with nothing — nothing. They are modules. Grouping is a tag and a query over the graph, neither of which anybody keeps true by hand.
What remains is a sequencing question, not a grouping one, and it moves rather than closes: whether applications leave the monorepo before or after they group is research 009's, because it is about how to get from here to there rather than about what the shape is.
Open (superseded by the above) questions
| Question | Why it is open |
|---|---|
| Whether provider modules group at all, and if so what a consumer's requirement names instead of a module. | The provisioning reference is load-bearing; getting it wrong is expensive. Opinion and evidence in the analysis; not yet decided. |
| Whether applications group into domains now and leave the monorepo later as a unit, or leave first. | Decided in principle — group first, then split — but the migration order has real cost either way. |
| What to do with the ~50 modules that co-change with nothing. | The evidence gives no grouping signal for them at all. That may mean they are correctly sized already. |
| Whether "group or leave" is even the right pair of options. | Research 006 finds a third fate — absorbed into the node host, ceasing to be a module at all — and argues it is the correct answer for the reachability cluster this effort measured. If so, the cluster this effort found is evidence for absorption rather than for grouping. |