The controller moves from a container to a process on the one machine
that runs it (novox/hq issue 213). Every orphan is removed before anything
is applied, so the container would go first and nothing would answer the
mesh's verbs while the process was fetched, unpacked and started — and
never again, if it did not start.
- a process may say what it `replaces`: resources the declaration no
longer declares. Such an orphan is kept through the up-front sweep and
removed right after the process applied and is up: active and running
at two looks ten seconds apart, the same main process, no restart in
between (stricter than ADR 0184's second look, which reads a unit
waiting to restart as running). If the process failed, was skipped
behind its module's step, or is not running, the orphan stays running
and recorded, reported kept, and the next apply hands it over.
Refused: naming something still declared, itself, an empty id, one
thing named by two processes, and `replaces` on a step or a schedule.
- beyond #85's oneshot unit for a step: a step written ./name runs its
own bundle's binary (tested), and is started, never enabled.
- a run-once process that fails gates its module, as a run-once
container already did, so a version whose preparation failed is not
started.
- an unchanged run-once process is not run again, and an unchanged
scheduled one is kept up by its timer: both were "a daemon that had
stopped" and were started on every apply.
A step was run directly: in the host's own working directory, without its env, env files or
user. A module step moved out of its container (node bootstrap/index.js) could find neither its
code nor its words. A oneshot unit carries all four as a daemon's does, and starting it waits.
A bundle compiled to a binary runs itself, but only the host knows where it unpacked it, and the
service manager takes no path relative to the working directory. A command written ./name is that
file in the process's own unpacked bundle, made absolute in the unit.
The process applier's unchanged path returned an outcome that said nothing about what was
written; the loop recorded it like any other, erasing the digest. The next cycle found no
record and re-created the daemon, the one after found a record again, and so on: the
node's runtime restarted every ten minutes on every machine since it arrived. The outcome
now carries the digest forward, as a file's does. The test applies one process three
times and asserts the record survives an unchanged apply and no restart is asked.
removeProcess deletes filepath.Join(daemonRoot, name) whole; a process named ".." made that
/var/lib/mesh. The declaration and the removal now hold the name to one rule.
A service undeclared used to be stopped: unassigning the private network stopped the container
runtime, unassigning sshd would stop ssh, an uplink module would take the machine offline. The
host now records the unit's state when it first applies it and restores that on undeclare —
found running stays running; started by the mesh (the converge filter) is stopped again; nothing
is started on the way out; a pre-existing record leaves the unit alone.
An undeclared process had no removal at all and failed every apply on its node; its unit, timer
and bundle are now removed.
Found by being asked whether processes and containers handle environment the
same way. They do not, and the difference is not cosmetic.
Docker passes --env through literally. A unit file reads three things out of a
value that nothing else does, and a module's environment routinely contains all
three because a generated password is arbitrary bytes:
- % begins a specifier. %H is the hostname. A password containing one is
silently replaced, and it fails later as an authentication error nobody can
explain by reading the declaration.
- whitespace separates assignments. Unquoted, K=a b sets K to "a" and reads
"b" as another assignment.
- a newline ends the line, and what follows is read as a unit DIRECTIVE.
The first two are escaped: quoted, with quotes and backslashes escaped and
percent doubled. The third cannot be — a unit's environment has no way to carry
a line break — so it is refused in validation, near whoever wrote it. Without
that, an environment value could write ExecStart= and have the machine run
something nobody declared.
Ordinary awkward values stay accepted, because refusing those too would leave a
module unable to hold a generated password.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01D6qtiYU3P9jk3pnAXyAFyx
The first cut of this added a `daemon` for the long-running case alone. That
would have meant a new vocabulary entry for each of the others — a scheduled
task, a run-once migration, a health check — when they are one thing run at
different cadences. That is a field, not four entries in a vocabulary where every
entry widens what a compromised control plane can express.
So it mirrors a container exactly, because it IS a container's twin: the same
intent, hosted by the machine's own supervisor instead of a runtime. Stays up,
runs once, or runs on a schedule.
Tools, hooks and event consumers are not further modes. They are loaded by a tool
host, which is itself a process that stays up — so the generic case already
covers them, which is the test of whether it is generic.
A scheduled process gets a timer and a unit that finishes; a long-running one
gets a unit that is restarted when it exits. Getting that wrong either way is a
second copy running continuously between fires, or a schedule that never fires.
The modes are exclusive and validation says so near the author: something that
runs once does not run on a schedule, and something not running between fires
cannot be restarted when a file changes.
A missed fire happens when the machine comes back rather than being skipped,
which is the difference between a machine that was down and a schedule that
quietly stopped.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01D6qtiYU3P9jk3pnAXyAFyx
jochen
jschoubben