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 mechanism
• 02-DECISIONS/0010-applications-live-in-their-own-repository.md — why applications are not here
• 02-DECISIONS/0030-the-repository-structure.md — the repositories, and the open tier-4 question this repository answers
• 03-DESIGN/00-as-is/10-module-catalogue.md — the catalogue's shape, and what it records