The mesh-catalog container goes with its Dockerfile, build bases, bus credential and mesh-state directory. Its words are the database URL file where the mesh writes it. `pg` is a dependency in its package.json, which the builder now installs and inlines into the bundle (mesh-controller: a TypeScript bundle installs its module's own packages). `prepares: true` needs a container running the module's own artifact, so it becomes what ADR 0198 §3 says it is: prepare/index.js run by node as a run-once process, with the same words and no bus, before the runtime is started with the version that needs it, and again when the database URL changes.
It brought its schema up inside its runtime, on every start. That made a schema it could not reach a
crash loop rather than a stop, with the module graph keeping a gap and nothing saying so — which is
how a whole morning's builds went unrecorded. The mesh now prepares this module's state before it
starts this version and does not start it if that failed (novox/hq ADR 0135): the work moves to an
entrypoint the image names in MESH_PREPARE, beside the entrypoints it already names.
The reason it was at start — that a step blocking the apply would block the very apply bringing the
overlay up — stopped being true when a step's failure became its module's business rather than the
machine's (ADR 0136).