jschoubben
43ca9c9c73
An identity is `mesh_<node>_<slug-or-name>` and a backend keeps 20 characters (an S3 access key). Overflow makes a module unresolvable, and this catalogue was finding it one module at a time, on a raise: route-proxy on novox is 22, home-assistant on ace is 23. Two found by hand where a sweep would have found eighteen. So the whole catalogue was swept instead, against the longest node name the mesh actually has (`shanks`, six characters) rather than against the node each module happens to sit on today — a module is assigned somewhere, and where is not a property of the manifest. That leaves eight characters for the identity source, and eighteen modules were over it. Slugs added, chosen to stay greppable in a provider's user list: anthropic-consumer claude openai-consumer openai anthropic-manager anthmgr portainer portain audit-logger audit public-acme pubacme bookshelf books qbittorrent qbt cloudflare-dns cfdns resolv-conf resolv confluence confl resolved-split-dns splitdns home-assistant hass route-proxy rproxy invoicing invoice verdaccio verdacc mosquitto mosq nextcloud ncloud A slug changes the login the mesh mints, so a module already provisioned under its full name is re-minted under the slug and its old login withdrawn — which is the provisioner's ordinary business, but it is a change, not a no-op. Checked with the real parser: every one of the 66 manifests through `catalogue.ParseManifest`, and every module's `CheckIdentity` against all four node names. 0 problems, where the same check over the parent commit reports 44.
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-control, 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 substrate, the control-plane
contexts and the surfaces are the mesh itself; they ship as their own repositories
(
mesh-host,mesh-substrate,mesh-control,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-control; 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