Three additions, and the third kills an assumption. Tools are the most common content in the catalogue — 56 of 126 modules, more than carry a service — and they survive the split without fitting either half. A tool is not an artifact and not node state; it is a contract the mesh publishes on a module's behalf, and what consumes it is an AGENT rather than another module. That is a second audience the design has not described. Whether it is one relation with two audiences or two relations is cheap to decide now and expensive later. A migration belongs to the CONSUMER and runs on the PROVIDER. A game's migrations run against the database the store granted it: owned by the consumer, hosted inside something it does not control, ordered after the provisioning edge because there is nothing to migrate until the grant exists, and scoped to that grant. Ownership crosses the edge, which nothing in provides and requires expresses — and it gives a consumer's own install an internal order, provisioned then migrated then started, that depends on an edge rather than on its contents. And provisioning is EARLY, not late. The assumption worth killing is that it is something the control plane does for consumers once a mesh is running. The mesh's own registry database is provisioned before there is a mesh, and so is its virtual host on the broker: the store runs from the carried bundle, a database is created in it, the mesh's own schema is applied, and only then does a control plane exist. Steps two and three happen before there is a mesh to do them, so provisioning is part of the bootstrap and part of what the bundle has to express. Which strains ADR 0043. The host applies declared state ON THIS MACHINE, and a database inside a running store is not a file or a unit. At bootstrap it is at least local — the store is on the same machine. Afterwards a consumer on one node provisioned from a store on another is the ordinary case and reaching it is not the host's job. The same operation is local at bootstrap and remote later, which is either two mechanisms or one with a tier boundary crossing inside it. Currently the sharpest unresolved thing in the effort.
01-RESEARCH
Investigations that have not yet hardened into design.
Structure
Each effort lives in NNN-descriptive-name/ and must contain 00-overview.md, carrying its
state in YAML frontmatter and a prose summary below it:
---
status: active | graduated | abandoned
initiated: YYYY-MM-DD
touches: [] # design docs, subsystems or areas the effort bears on
became: [] # required when status is terminal — what it turned into
---
The prose says what is being investigated, why, and what it touches. It does not restate the status — status lives in one place, and two places is one too many.
Further documents in the same folder hold the work itself: notes, evidence, option analyses, draft designs.
Lifecycle
| status | Meaning |
|---|---|
active |
Investigation in progress. |
graduated |
Checked against 00-META, decided in 02-DECISIONS/, and specified in 03-DESIGN — see became:. |
abandoned |
Stopped or superseded. Nothing is deleted. |
An effort graduates by producing a decision record and a 03-DESIGN entry. It is abandoned
in place — never deleted. What was rejected, and why, is the more expensive half to
rediscover.
Starting and closing efforts is playbook territory:
00-META/process/01-research.md and
02-graduation.md.
Rules
- Markdown only. Do not skip or reuse a sequence number.
- Evidence, not assertion. An effort that measured nothing has not finished.
- Research describes real observations but never identifies the mesh it observed. The shape of a finding survives anonymisation intact.