The first three steps of the substrate bootstrap, run on a lab machine
confirmed to have no route out. It went from bare to a container runtime
installed and enabled, PostgreSQL running from an image pinned by digest, and
the control plane's database created inside it -- from the file the host
carries, with nothing to ask.
Second run changed nothing. `owned` lists all five afterwards, and `mesh` is in
the store.
It stops before the last two steps because there is no control plane yet: its
schema cannot be loaded and its image does not exist. The bundle says so rather
than naming something that cannot be applied.
Two things fixed on the way.
`make host BUNDLE=...` still swapped a file called substrate.lock, which the
per-system split had renamed months of decisions ago -- it now takes SYSTEM and
replaces that system's bundle. And the .lock files still cited ADR 0060, since
the renumbering pass only covered .md, .go, .ts and .sh.
One thing learned by it failing first: a directory the host creates is owned by
root, and a database inside a container runs as somebody else, so it could not
write and the container crash-looped. The store's data is a named volume now,
which lets the image set up its own ownership and outlives the container --
which is what you want for the thing holding the mesh's state.
Worth noting the failure was caught by the action's verify rather than by the
container step. `docker inspect` reported the container running because it was,
briefly, between restarts. Running is not working, and the thing that knew the
difference was the step that asked the database whether it would answer.
Two gaps.
The bundle's contents are per system even though its mechanism is not, so there
are now three: substrate-arch.lock, substrate-alpine.lock and
substrate-android.lock. All three are embedded and a host reads only the one it
was built for. Arch and Alpine remain placeholders -- the closure for a one-node
mesh is still research 011/012's open question, and inventing it here would be
worse than an honest placeholder.
Android's is not a placeholder. It says a partial host cannot raise a mesh and
why: every step of a bootstrap is a package, a container, or an action against
one, and those are exactly the shapes it refuses. So a partial host can JOIN a
mesh and cannot BE the first node. That belongs where somebody looking for the
android bundle will find it.
Also separated two things that were being conflated: "this system has no
bundle" and "this system was never built". Loading a bundle for debian is not
ErrEmpty, and the test asserts they differ.
0062 -- a host may be episodic. There is no way to keep a process running on an
ordinary Android device: init needs root, a foreground service can be killed
for memory. The answer is not to fight that. It is that being killed IS
disconnection, which ADR 0036 already made an ordinary situation -- and
everything the design does for a laptop that closes is what an episodic host
needs, at a shorter period. An authoritative local store, reconcile on start,
last-heard-from reported without an alarm.
So the gap closes by requiring less rather than building something. No keep-
alive, no Android daemon, no fighting the platform's process management.
Two consequences recorded rather than glossed. Last-heard-from is a much weaker
signal on an episodic host, so a healthy phone reads as a dead server unless
the reader knows which kind it is looking at. And a declaration may take a long
time to land, which makes 0058's separation of outstanding from failed
load-bearing rather than tidy.
Left open deliberately: how an episodic host is actually started, and -- first --
what an Android node is for. Building the start mechanism before deciding that
would be building it for nobody.
jschoubben