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/145. "N machine(s), all doing what they were told, all
heard from, running what the mesh would send them, and every module
current with its source" was true for eleven hours of a mesh in which no
module could reach another. An operator read it, and every routine check
they made afterwards — ports from outside, routed services, egress —
passed, because the broken path was module-to-module over the machine's
own name and nothing exercises that.
Every question the sentence answers is about the mesh and a machine
agreeing: applied what it was sent, matches what would be sent, built from
what the source has. None dials a provision, and the mesh composes every
one of those grants itself. So the sentence now says so, in the reader's
way, immediately below it.
This is not the check ADR 0146 describes and does not pretend to be. It
closes the distance between "the machines are as the mesh described them"
and "it works" by naming it, which is where the eleven hours went.
Also: printStatus is separated from the asking, so its exact words can be
read by a test with no store, bus or machine. Those words have been acted
on and been misleading twice — here, and a held module reading as a
machine doing what it was told (04-ISSUES/125) — which makes them the
thing worth holding still.
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.
novox/hq 04-ISSUES/125. A module assigned to a machine and never taken
runs none of what it declares. Status had no vocabulary for it: the
machine was heard from, current, and doing what it was told, so the mesh
printed "all doing what they were told" — which was true, and was acted
on, and every public name on the machine went dark.
Status now names each module a machine is holding rather than running,
per machine and with a count, read from what the MACHINE reported rather
than from the mesh's take-time listing — the machine is the only thing
that knows what it found. The JSON form carries the same rows, absent
rather than empty when nothing is held.
And a hold suppresses the all-well sentence, where being adopted does
not: adopted is a mode somebody chose, a module assigned and never taken
is a half-finished action with nothing left to finish it. The condition
is now a named function so the rule lives in one place and a test binds
to the real thing rather than a copy of it.
untakenModules raises a read it cannot make rather than answering "holding
nothing" from a failed query, which is the shape this whole issue is.
The mesh kept one report per machine, replaced, so a resource nothing can ever apply
looked like a failure that had just happened, every reconcile interval, for ever.
The row now keeps when the current failure began and how many reports in a row have
said it — the same outcome, refusal and failed resources; anything different starts
again and a clean apply clears it. Three make the machine stuck, and status says so
beside the failure, in words and in JSON (novox/hq 04-ISSUES/065, ADR 0090).
One name per thing, per the HQ glossary: the module/container/image/binary/repo
becomes mesh-controller, the seat the-controller, and the store+broker pair the
foundation (embedded base bundles, default template and example lock renamed with
their go:embed directives). No behaviour change — a pure vocabulary rename.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01D6qtiYU3P9jk3pnAXyAFyx
jschoubben