jschoubben
3249b9a0cc
The predecessor serves the registry under a public name, behind htpasswd basic auth, with a twenty-gigabyte body limit for layer pushes. The mesh's registry has no name, no lock and no limit — by design inside the mesh, where the private network is the boundary and every node pulls without an account (hq ADR 0082). Taking the name over must not change that. A route on `distribution` itself would: contributing a route is requiring one, and the store is raised at genesis on a node with no proxy. So the public door is `distribution-gate`, a second registry process on the same volume, behind the registry's own htpasswd (the predecessor's realm, the predecessor's file, carried in with `secret accept`), with the route and its limit. It requires the store's storage as a node-scoped provision, so it can only land beside the store. The store's own door is untouched — no auth, no htpasswd — which is what keeps the builder's pushes and every node's pulls working. Both processes read the predecessor's configuration where it changed behaviour: delete enabled, which tag retention depends on; no per-process descriptor cache, which two processes over one store cannot share; the CORS headers for the retired interface dropped. route-adapter writes the limit as the predecessor's own buffering middleware, named after the router, only when asked for — and skips a route whose limit it cannot read rather than carrying what the module said not to. hq ADR 0082/0104, the registry hand-over.
mesh-catalog
The Novox Mesh catalogue. The modules the mesh builds, provisions and runs — as manifests, one
per module under modules/.
This is data, not a control-plane concern. The manifests describe what a module is: what it
provides, what it requires, the seats it claims, the resources the host applies for it. The
engine that reads them — parsing, eligibility resolution, sealing, declaration emission — lives
in the control plane (novox/mesh-controller, internal/catalogue), which consumes this repository
as a build source. The host (novox/mesh-host) applies the declarations the control plane emits.
Neither is here.
What a module is, and is not
A module is one thing the mesh can run, named once, described completely by its manifest. A
manifest names its image (pinned by digest), the resources the host owns for it (directories,
files, the container, the private network it joins), what it requires from a provider and what
it provides to consumers, and the sealed secrets it needs filled on the machine.
- Core mesh components are not modules. The node host, the foundation, the control-plane
contexts and the surfaces are the mesh itself; they ship as their own repositories
(
mesh-host,mesh-foundation,mesh-controller,mesh-surfaces,mesh-sdk), not from here. - Standalone applications are not here either. A larger application lives in its own repository with its manifest at the root, registered with the mesh as a build source (novox/hq ADR 0010). This repository holds the modules the mesh maintains as its shared catalogue; an application the mesh merely hosts keeps its manifest beside its own code.
So there is one home for the catalogue the mesh owns, and every application that runs on the mesh rather than being of it carries its own — both reach the pipeline the same way, as a registered source.
Layout
modules/<name>.json one manifest per module
Flat, because the catalogue's shape carries no meaning: a module is found by its name and described by its manifest, and what relates two modules — a shared seat, a claim, a provider/consumer edge — is data inside the manifests, not a directory the tree encodes (novox/hq, the domain-grouping question closed in favour of seats, claims and tags).
The manifest contract
The shape a manifest must satisfy is owned by the control plane's catalogue engine and is what
validates a manifest before a machine ever sees it — a stray key, a consumer contributing the
wrong provision field, an image that nothing builds. That validation belongs with this
repository and is being re-homed here from mesh-controller; until it is, the pipeline is the
gate — it builds each module and refuses a manifest it cannot resolve.
Where the reasoning lives
Design and decisions are in novox/hq:
02-DECISIONS/0002-everything-is-a-module.md— one unit, no second mechanism02-DECISIONS/0010-applications-live-in-their-own-repository.md— why applications are not here02-DECISIONS/0030-the-repository-structure.md— the repositories, and the open tier-4 question this repository answers03-DESIGN/00-as-is/10-module-catalogue.md— the catalogue's shape, and what it records