jschoubben
a1d98c2438
At 2026-11-02 22:55:58 the provisioner's first pass after a new membership read part of the picture, took the modules missing from it as handing nothing, set 21 route keys of running web apps retiring and asked the operator to remove them; 3 s later the next pass put every plan back. Only 3 asks reached the router; the other 18 were refused yet counted asked. Third of its kind (937, 1332), so the kind is fixed, not the instance. Quick fix: wait for the watched reads' first load before any pass. Thorough fix, chosen because the kind recurred three times and its obvious answer would cut running apps off their routes: - no pass judges before placement, wants, haves, the indexer's modules and the published compositions have loaded once; a read error fails the pass instead of reading as empty; - while a module's composition is not published at its build, no key on that node turns retiring and no plan is removed; a placed module with no known build is held, not counted as handing nothing; - a key whose consumer still has a want or a have on the node and no plan read in this pass is left as it is; - a pass that would retire most of a node's consumers at once (more than 3, or more than half and at least 2) retires and asks nothing and says it as a fault through provisioner_health (runtime-health, so a condition names the likely cause); provisioner_compose retire-many is the operator's word that such a removal is meant; - at most 3 asks stand open (the router's bound per asker); the rest wait and are raised as one ends, and an ask the router holds no record of a minute on is raised again. Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01NcbgfJ9Gum47zkFKWRaovL
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