jschoubben
daf3e17c32
The identity provider is settled as not-substrate: the mesh does not require one, tier 2 authenticates natively, and it is a hosted service like any other. Four substrate services, not five. The tier test's second step gains the verb that matters — can the control plane START without it, not function fully without it. That verb answers the forge and the registries. They are not substrate and they are not duplicated: the control plane starts and manages nodes without a forge, it just cannot change itself. One gitea module, tier 4, and the mesh's own instance is distinguished by what it is bound to rather than by being a different module — the same answer as postgres, from the same test. It also buys a property worth having: if the forge dies the mesh keeps running. Delivery needing them is not an upward dependency, resolved the way the constitution already says to: tier 2 declares requirements, tier 4 provides implementations, the binding is data. The mechanism is provisioning, and the new idea is that the control plane is itself a consumer. Self-hosting therefore becomes a state the mesh REACHES, not a precondition. A first node comes up from pinned external artifacts and re-binds to internal providers once they exist. Today's mesh assumes the second state from the first moment, which is why the first-node path needs a script that papers over an impossibility and is the least-exercised code in the system. Made explicit, the transition is also reversible. Research 007 and 008 opened for the two areas flagged as important and complex, scoped from the weaknesses the as-is layer already documents rather than started blank. And the origin: this began as a dotfiles repository. The first two days adopt dotfiles, add per-node overrides, and introduce service symlinking with an ignore file. The flat one-directory-per-tool catalogue, linking over copying, adoption of already-configured machines, per-node overrides and the desktop modules are all inherited rather than chosen for a mesh. That is the single most useful fact for anyone changing the catalogue, it strengthens ADR 0018 — the case for links was never made for a mesh — and it explains research 005's silent fifty: dotfiles-era entries for one tool never shared a domain because they never had one.
7.0 KiB
layer, status, code, updated, decisions
| layer | status | code | updated | decisions | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| as-is | implemented |
|
2026-08-23 |
|
The catalogue, and what its shape says
The catalogue holds 124 modules. Thirty-three belong to the mesh's own domain; the other ninety-one run on the mesh rather than being of it (ADR 0015).
The count is not the finding. The shape is.
How it is organised today
By namespace, and the namespace records origin rather than purpose:
- The mesh's own namespace holds the platform: the runtime and its daemons, the shared library, delivery, provisioning, configuration synchronisation, knowledge, identity, the board, developer tooling, and node presentation.
- A second namespace holds the work domain — tasks, workflows, agents, meetings — split across a handful of packages that share one schema.
- Everything else sits flat at the top level, one directory per piece of software.
What the flat level actually contains
Grouped by what they are for — a grouping the catalogue itself does not express:
| Purpose | Roughly |
|---|---|
| Data and storage services the mesh provisions against | Relational and document databases, a cache, an object store, a package registry, a time-series store |
| Messaging and identity | A message broker, an identity provider |
| Reachability | A VPN, a firewall, an intrusion filter, an SSH daemon, a resolver, a certificate authority, a reverse proxy, network equipment control |
| Forge and container plumbing | Forge integrations, an image registry, container lifecycle and retention |
| Media libraries | Acquisition, organisation, playback, transcoding, streaming |
| Workstation and desktop | Browser, file manager, monitors, session management, audio, package management, runtime managers |
| Hardware-specific support | Power and firmware control for particular hardware, filesystem management |
| Collaboration and productivity | File sync, office tooling, boards, automation, chat and messaging bridges, mail, analytics, dashboards, home automation, issue trackers and wikis |
| Third-party organisation integrations | Systems belonging to organisations outside the mesh |
Every row is several modules, and no row is a thing the mesh can see. Four modules together constitute "how a node is reachable", and they have no relationship the mesh can assign, version, reason about or replace as one unit. A change to how the mesh handles connectivity is made four times.
What the shape records
The catalogue's shape records what was installed, not what anything is for. One module is the unit of one piece of software, because that is the only granularity the module system offers.
This is the same failure ADR 0015 names for the platform core — boundaries drawn by deployment accident rather than by domain — appearing outside it, at four times the scale. The core is being recomposed; the flat level is addressed in principle by ADR 0017, which deliberately does not yet settle the domain list.
Where the shape came from
The catalogue's shape is not arbitrary and it is not a series of mistakes. This repository began as a dotfiles repository, and most of what looks inexplicable is inherited from that directly.
The evidence is in the first two days of history: adopt desktop dotfiles and scripts from the
original dotfiles repository; per-node dotfile overrides; service symlinking, node
.dfignore, headless server support — all on 2026-02-24 and 2026-02-25, before anything
resembling a mesh existed. Forty-five commits mention dotfiles.
Read that way, several things stop being puzzles:
| Feature of today's shape | Dotfiles ancestor |
|---|---|
| One flat directory per piece of software | Exactly how a dotfiles repository is organised |
| Linking rather than copying as a stated design principle | How every dotfiles manager works — the whole category is built on it |
| Adoption — taking over a machine that already exists, with its own configuration | The core dotfiles verb, and the reason a machine could be brought in at all |
| Per-node overrides | Per-host dotfile overrides, generalised into per-node module settings |
| Desktop and workstation modules — browser, file manager, editors, session, audio, personal scripts | Dotfiles content that became "modules" when modules became the only unit |
| An ignore file controlling what is placed on a machine | A dotfiles manager's ignore file |
The generalisation from place files on my machines to manage a mesh of nodes was the right move and it worked. What it did not do is revisit the assumptions underneath, because they were never stated as assumptions — they were just how the thing already worked.
This is the most useful single fact for anyone changing the catalogue, and it is why the linking principle in particular reads as a deliberate architectural choice when it is an inheritance. See ADR 0018, whose case this strengthens: the argument for links was never made for a mesh.
It also explains the measurement in research 005. Fifty modules that never change alongside anything are not fifty missing domains — many are dotfiles-era entries for one piece of software, which never shared a domain because they never had one.
Two properties worth keeping
Whatever replaces the shape, two things about it are right.
Uniformity. A media server and the mesh's own coordinator are installed, provisioned, delivered and verified by identical machinery. The mesh's own components hold no privilege — which is what makes dogfooding structural rather than a discipline, and what makes moving a module out of the repository safe.
Placement is already decided. A standalone application belongs in its own repository (ADR 0010), and reviewers reject it in the monorepo. The catalogue's flat level is not a dumping ground by policy; it is one by history.
Known inconsistencies in the catalogue itself
Recorded because a reader will meet them:
- A documented requirement that every capability-exposing module declare the core runtime as a dependency is met by zero modules.
- A firewall-scoping key is declared by five manifests and read by none
(
04-ISSUES/003). - A connections block in the manifest is metadata: it describes a module's reachability and wires nothing.
- At least one module deliberately runs outside the standard per-module supervision, for reasons recorded in the operational memory. The standard path is not universal.