novox/hq 04-ISSUES/087. The version I shipped this morning said "N
machine(s) run an older host than another machine does" and worked it out
by comparing versions as strings. A host reports its version as a commit.
Commits have no order.
On the live mesh it named the three machines running the NEWER host as the
ones behind: `ced54d4` sorts above `04a27ca` and means nothing. An
arbitrary lexicographic result, presented as a fact, about the one thing
this was built to make trustworthy.
It now reports the split — which machines run which version — and claims
no ordering:
4 machine(s) do not all run the same host:
04a27ca g14, novox, shanks
ced54d4 ace
a host refuses a declaration carrying a field it does not know, whole
— so the mesh may send only what every one of these understands. Which
of them is newer is not readable from a commit; that needs a version
the host reports as ordered
More useful as well as more honest: the reader sees who is on which side
of the split, which is what decides whether a field can be sent.
A report that confidently says the opposite of the truth is worse than one
that says less — which is the subject of 04-ISSUES/145, arriving by my own
door within an hour of my closing it.
novox/hq 04-ISSUES/087. A host refuses a declaration carrying a field it
does not know, and refuses it WHOLE — deliberately, because that keeps a
half-understood declaration off a machine. It makes every new declaration
field a flag day: hosts first, then the controller. The mesh had no record
of which host any machine ran, so that order was kept by somebody
remembering it, and a machine that refused for this reason reported a
failure with nothing saying why.
The machine has reported its host version since ADR 0141. The
controller's own copy of the report did not have the field, so it was
unmarshalled into nothing and thrown away on arrival. It has it now,
records it, and shows it in `node show` — "not reported" rather than
blank, because a machine that has not said is not a machine running
nothing.
Status says which machines run an older host than another machine does,
and which is newest. Deliberately disagreement rather than staleness:
nothing delivers a host version yet (ADR 0141, accepted and not built), so
the mesh holds no canonical current version and cannot honestly say a
machine is behind THE host. What it can say is that the oldest host in the
mesh is what the mesh may send.
A machine that has reported nothing is left out rather than called
behind. Versions compare as strings, which suits the timestamps and
commits this mesh uses and is wrong for a scheme where "10" sorts before
"9" — said in the code, at the place that would have to learn.
jschoubben