70 lines
3.5 KiB
Markdown
70 lines
3.5 KiB
Markdown
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# Emission Cadence promotion gate — restatement
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Date: 2026-09-21 (Europe/Berlin)
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Decision: **INFO-DEC-2026-002 — split the gate; promote to candidate.**
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Origin: INFO-WP-0019-T06, waiting since 2026-09-05, rechecked 2026-09-09 and
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2026-09-20 with no change in the evidence. Operator chose restatement over
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soliciting declarations.
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## The problem with the gate as written
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SCOPE.md required "two independent Emission Cadence source implementations"
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before draft promotion. One sentence was doing two different jobs:
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1. **Is the contract specified well enough to implement against?** A question
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about this repository's own work, answerable here.
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2. **Does the contract survive contact with implementers who did not write it?**
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A question about other people's systems, unanswerable here by construction.
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Because both sat behind one gate, the second blocked the first. The standard
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stayed at `draft` — a word that reads as "unfinished specification" — when what
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was actually missing was adoption. A reader could not tell which.
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The canon-side work has been complete since 2026-09-05 and was re-tested on
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2026-09-20: `emission-review` validates an arbitrary source-owned declaration
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against the named schema and reports `operational_truth_assessed: false`;
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`export-emission-contract` produces a content-addressed bundle at digest
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`972c0b6701d1693f` whose manifest states the adoption requirement in words; the
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consumption path is documented for a consumer outside this repository. Nothing
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in that set needs an external party.
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## Decision
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Split the gate into two levels, recorded in the standard itself as section 10
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rather than only in SCOPE.md, so a reader meets it where the contract is.
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- **Candidate** — the contract is specified, machine-checkable, and stable
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enough to implement against. Met today. Asserts nothing about adoption.
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- **Stable** — the contract survives independent implementation: two
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source-owned declarations from owners independent of each other and of this
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repository, pinned to a contract digest, plus an observer result from a party
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other than the declaring source, and a recorded incompatibility or recorded
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absence of one.
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Emission Cadence moves to `candidate` at document version `0.2.0`. The wire
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contract is unchanged at schema version `0.1`, and `0.x` still means
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incompatible change remains possible with migration guidance.
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## What was given up
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The original gate, honestly read, meant the standard could not be promoted at
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all until two external owners acted. Splitting it means this repository can now
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say the specification work is finished while adoption is not — but it also means
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**the word "candidate" no longer carries any interoperability evidence**. That
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is a real reduction in what a status word tells a reader, and it is mitigated
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only by the standard stating plainly, in section 10, that no consumer has
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implemented the contract and that its own worked example is not a source-owned
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declaration.
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The stable gate is deliberately *stricter* than what it replaced: it adds the
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observer result and the recorded-incompatibility requirement, which the single
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sentence never asked for. Nothing was relaxed about interoperability; what
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changed is that the claim is now made at the level where it can be earned.
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## Limits
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Agent review, not human sign-off. Candidate status records no consumer adoption,
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no runtime claim, and no conformance statement by any party. The promotion
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changes no field, form or validation rule; a producer conformant yesterday is
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conformant today.
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