mesh/merge-gate pass: builds build-agent, mesh-controller, route-proxy → ace, g14, novox, shanks; no bus step; every machine composes with the change as it…
A plan's gated send for mail carried postgres's and mongodb's new builds
(policy record) to the control node and the anchor on 2026-10-07: a send
composes the machine's whole declaration from the builds the mesh holds,
and the gate only ever looked at modules that roll out. Every send but a
person's push now composes a recorded module from the manifest of the build
the machine was last sent and records that it still carries it; the bus
step moves the bus alone. And each move a gated send carries says how many
of the module's containers it recreates, and whether with a new image or
only their declaration.
While the mesh-delivery seat has a holder on record, a merge that moves no
core module opens its walk and asks nothing until mesh-delivery or a person
says go; nothing of it is registered before its turn, so no other send
carries it. The controller keeps the planner, the gate, sending and the
walk, and gains the verbs the owner asks with: delivery-plan, -order,
-check (a group composed as one future state), deliver, delivery-stop,
delivery-walks; every walk kept is said as plan-moved.
touchedBy is now the only mapping of changed files onto modules — touched, added, and
read by no build — and reachOfMerge the planner's whole answer with the dependency walk.
The merge handler, the plan what-if, the merge gate's width and composition, and a pull
request's check all ask it, so planning and gating cannot disagree. The gate composes
the definitions of the modules a merge would rebuild or add, not every one in the tree,
and the check says the dependents a merge would build after them.
mesh/merge-gate error: the check could not run: a throwaway postgres:17-alpine could not be raised: docker run --label mesh.build=build-1791318263948250337…
mesh/merge-gate error: the check could not run: a throwaway postgres:17-alpine could not be raised: docker run --label mesh.build=build-1791317509716888018…
An image is not byte-reproducible, so ADR 0236's 'same artifacts is no move'
never held for one: a catalogue merge that did not touch the bus rebuilt it,
and every send to the control node waited for a planned bus upgrade.
The builder now records a source fingerprint per build (module tree, context
trees, bases and toolchains by digest). A rebuild with the fingerprint of the
build it repeats is registered with that build's artifacts, handed to modules
standing on it, holds no push, demands no bus step, and a plan sends and
gates nothing for it. Identical artifacts remain a second way to be no move.
The merge of mesh-catalog 7f99fb4a rebuilt 103 modules with the build agent in tier 0, and ADR
0236 recorded it as "a change to the build agent rebuilds most of the catalogue". The agent had
not changed: modules/showcase/index.ts had. showcase is the catalogue's reference module, held
by no machine, and its manifest was not in the merge, so whatTheMergeTouched read the file as
shared code and rebuilt everything built from the repository (88 came out byte-identical). The
agent stood first only because everything is built by it.
Whether a directory is a module is a fact of the repository at the merge commit, so the forge's
announcer now says it: module_dirs, the changed files' directories holding a module.json there,
with module_dirs_said. A changed file inside one is that module's business; only a file in no
such directory is shared. An announcer that does not say keeps the old rule. `plans` what-if
takes the same list as module-dirs.
And a regression for the open question: nothing depends on the build agent except by being
built by it, and built-by never widens a plan, so a change to the agent - manifest or program -
rebuilds the agent alone; what moved beside it is ordered after it.
A send carries the machine's whole declaration, so at the switch to roll the next send of
anything would have carried the old default's backlog, unjudged, to every machine. A gated
send now carries and judges everything waiting on its machine; every other send is refused
or leaves the machine; a release plan walks what waits one machine at a time, the control
node last, and one that fails holds the next until a person releases it.
A build that reported applied was sent everywhere; one that then did nothing, served
no tools or broke its machine's word reached every machine. Now the first machine is
judged by the component's health (the core's definitions, as doctor probes H-*, or a
module's own) three times over two minutes within ten; a failing gate puts the previous
build back there once, marks the build, and says it as a condition and an event.
Upgrades roll out by default; the bus is a planned step; a module deleted at its
source is not built (the public-acme plan failure).
Two controllers could both act (issue 204), a reconcile's report could
overtake the apply after it and the digest decided (issue 267), and a grant
could make a second writer of a machine's report.
- The lease (internal/lease, ADR 0229): mesh-controller_lease key `holder`,
15 s age, renewed every 5 s by compare-and-set; the epoch is the revision
it was taken at. The gate is the clock (stops 3 s before expiry); a refused
renewal is a loss and the process exits; a holder that stops gives it back.
serve takes it before asserting the bus. Epochs kept in the store
(migration 0068 controller_epoch) as a floor: a bucket raised from nothing
is compacted past it. Unleased (no epoch, S12 urgent) only when nobody
holds it and the bus will not let it be written. A shell command acts
under the holder's epoch, or its own lease when none.
- Declarations carry `epoch` inside the signed envelope, only to a machine
whose latest account carried a report_sequence (mesh-host #35); would-send
is composed with the epoch last sent. Allot and the send both pass the gate.
- Reports: contract in internal/link/order.go (epoch, sequence,
report_sequence, older_than, refused_older). Accounts kept by epoch, then
sequence, then report sequence; older refused, counted; unordered reports
keep the digest rule. Plans by compare-and-set on a revision, with epoch.
Conditions and calls carry the epoch and are not written off the lease.
- S12 and S13 (naming the writer by epoch) watched, D5 run; reset of the
bucket said. Writers table compiled in and enforced in PermissionsFor; the
controller no longer publishes mesh.control.>. A contract per consumed
kind, and the empty-on-error lint over the repository.
- mesh-host pinned to its main with the epoch in the validator (D1 validates
the envelope as sent).
Needs mesh-host's genesis lock with the lease grant (mesh-host PR) for
TestTheInstallersFirstUserListIsWhatTheControllerWouldCompose.
A controller restart lost every call's outcome, `status` composed the mesh
while its caller waited (18.6s live on 2026-10-06, past the 10s window), a
repair by hand left no trace, and the core's bounds had nothing measured to
be set from.
- calls: kept in the controller's bucket mesh-controller_calls (last 1000 or
14 days, answers bounded to 64 KiB), read by id across a restart; a
controller starting marks a stopped one's running calls abandoned; each
call names its caller from the inbox its answer goes to.
- status: the serving controller composes it at start, after news from a
machine, a build or an acting verb, and every minute; the verb answers the
last composition at once with when and how long it took. Composing resolves
each machine once instead of twice.
- hand-act log in mesh-controller_hand-acts: push (required through the seat),
plans stop/close, broker consumer-reset and the new hand-act record take
--why/--cause/--condition; `hand-acts` lists them and repeated causes;
status counts the week's.
- durations (migration 0066): apply (send to first report), heartbeat gap,
plan tier and build, recorded as heard; `durations` summarises them.
- the controller's seat row takes this binary's definition of its own verbs,
so the console no longer judges calls against an older build's schema.
- the controller is granted its two buckets' subjects.
A registered replay asked now outranked newer asks of its module, and a plan
took any later outcome as its answer. A replay is now refused while the module
is asked anywhere, a plan module asked under an id is answered by that id
alone, and a rebuild of a commit asks what the module follows. An ask handed
back after a restart no longer reads as dead; a cancel that meets a start is
withdrawn; pause holds for an ask fetched as it lands; kill removes containers
before and after the build ends and says whether its outcome went out; a
holder may say only its own machine is paused.
Nothing showed what waited for a build machine, and an ask could not be
dropped without leaving the plan that made it waiting for ever. New verbs:
queue, cancel, clear, rebuild, replay, kill, pause, resume, and plans retry.
Every ask a person drops is recorded failed through the same take-in as a
failed build; a plan keeps the id it asked each module under and matches
its outcome by it. replay is a dry run unless registered, and registering
an older commit than one registered since needs --older (hq issue 207).
A plan waiting on a seat paused on every holder says so and is not late;
a failed plan can be retried, and a rebuild joins the plan holding the
module instead of running beside it.
With one machine first a module is sent twice, and the tier gate asked every
machine for a report after the second send: the first machine's report, made
between the two, read as stale and the plan waited for ever (hq issue 256).
Also round a plan's wait to the second, not the minute, so it is not 0s.
A first machine that does not report within the bound now stops the
module's rollout, naming it. The first machine is the first by name heard
from lately; reports are judged by what the store says was last sent. A
plan that ends says what it built and never sent, and a failed send's
error is kept in the plan's note.
A merge planned without looking at open plans, so two plans worked the
same modules and a stuck plan stayed open for ever. The newer plan folds
in what older plans of the same repository and branch had not built or
sent, and closes them as superseded. A person can close a stuck plan by
id with `plans close <id>`.
A plan sent every machine running a module at once, ignoring the module's
upgrade policy. Unless the policy says together, the first machine by name
is sent, recorded in the plan, and the rest follow only once its report
after the send says it applied; a failed first machine stops the plan.
The controller's machine moves it from the container to a process by
starting the process first and removing the container once the process
is up (mesh-host's `replaces`). For that moment two controllers share the
store and the bus. Checked what each does:
- the seat's verbs: a queue group per seat, each call answered once. Safe.
- the controller's consumers on CONTROL and EVENTS: push consumers with
no delivery group, so the second bind is refused with "consumer is
already bound" and serve exited. The process would restart for ever,
the host would never see it up, and the container would never go. The
second controller now stands by and binds when the first lets go
(tested on a real bus; fails without the change).
- plans: read, changed and saved whole by the 30s timer, by build
outcomes, by a merge and by `plans stop`. Two timers would each ask a
tier the other had just asked. Working the plans now takes a
session-level advisory lock on the inventory: the timer skips while
another holds it, the other paths wait for it. Build asks happen only
inside plan work and are covered by the same lock.
Builds of one module in flight together finish in any order, and the mesh
took whatever it heard last as what the module is: RegisterModule overwrote
the module's manifest unconditionally, and Held/BuiltAgainst/ReadRepositories
ordered builds by when they were recorded. A postgres build asked before the
mesh-tools runtime fix finished after the one asked after it, and the next
push deployed the stale image (novox/hq issue 219).
A build is now ordered by when it was asked, read from the build-<nanos> id
the controller writes: build.asked and module.built_asked (migration 0055).
A registration from an earlier request than the module's current one is
recorded and refused as superseded. A plan takes as its outcome only a build
asked at or after its own ask, so an earlier plan's leftover build cannot
settle a later plan. Ids of any other shape keep the old order.
A build asked at a commit recorded that commit as the module's ref. Every merge after it failed to
match the module and its plan left it out without a word, and every plan that rebuilt it asked for
the same old commit again. Registration now keeps the branch the module followed (the default
branch for a new one); matching and re-asking read a recorded commit as the default branch, which
heals records already pinned this way; and a merge says which modules of its repository it leaves
out because they follow another branch.
A merge to the controller's own repository replaces the controller in its first tier; the build
that produced the new one was recorded, the plan never heard it, and it waited for ever with every
later plan behind it. The record is the fact: a build recorded after the ask is the tier's outcome,
whoever was listening when it came.
A plan is ordered by artifacts and says nothing about what must be running before what (ADR 0162);
on 2026-10-03 that put the build machine in tier 0 and the controller in tier 1, and the new build
machine could not bind the worker the old controller had defined. One running order enters the
graph, named as its own edge: a module claiming the build seat follows the control plane, and the
built-by edge from the control plane to that holder yields to it — the controller is built by
whichever build machine is running, as the runtime image always was. The edge orders a plan and
never widens it, like built-by.
Given a repository and the files a branch changes (or the modules by name), plans answers with the tiers
the merge handler would produce — the modules those files touch, what packages their source, everything
reachable along the dependency relation — and what each tier does: built and sent to its machines, or
built and left because its policy records. Saved nowhere. On the seat as plans {repository, paths|modules}.
A dependent rebuilt because its base moved, or a module that packages another repository's source,
keeps its source commit; the catalogue announces no move for it, and its machines kept the old image
until somebody pushed — forty-three modules after every runtime-image merge (hq issue 189). When a tier
is built, the plan now sends the machines of every module in it whose policy rolls out, once, moved
commit or not; a module whose policy records is built and left, as its policy says. The gate between
tiers waits as before for the ones a later tier is built by.
A tier whose module a later tier is built by waited for the machines running it to report after the
build — and relied on the catalogue's moved event to send them. A rebuild from the same source commit is
not a move the catalogue announces: the build machine rebuilt for a controller change kept its commit,
nothing sent it, and the plan waited on a report that would never come (2026-10-01, 19:45Z). The plan
now sends the machines running a gated module once, records when, and waits for the reports after that.
The first live plan took seventy-five modules along for a controller change: the builder packages the
controller's source, everything is built by the builder, so everything was reachable. A module built by
the build machine is not changed by a new build machine. Reachability now follows the code and build
edges only; built-by still orders a tier after the build machine and gates it on the machine's roll-out.
plans stop <id> ends a plan by hand: what was asked still builds and registers, nothing further is asked.
The mesh's seat answers plans — the recent plans with their tier, what each waits for and since when,
or one plan whole given its id — so the console reads a merge's progress where it reads everything
else, instead of a person reading the daemon's log.
A module's dependencies are one relation in the catalogue — stands-on, packages, built-by, declared —
answered by one call. A merge takes what moved and everything reachable from it, sorts the set into
tiers (a code dependency in the same tier, a build dependency after its base is built, a runtime
dependency after the build machine is built and running; the build machine's own base comes first,
built by the one that runs), writes the plan to the store, asks the first tier and returns. Every
outcome advances the plan; a ticker advances what outcomes cannot; a controller replaced mid-plan
resumes it. status lists open plans and names one that has waited too long.
jochen
jschoubben