The gate required two independent source implementations before draft
promotion, which made one sentence do two jobs: whether the contract is
specified well enough to implement against, which this repository can answer,
and whether it survives implementers who did not write it, which it cannot. The
second blocked the first, so the standard sat at draft — a word that reads as
unfinished specification — when what was missing was adoption.
Candidate now requires schema coverage of every form, one-command validation of
an arbitrary source-owned declaration, a content-addressed bundle a source can
pin to, separation of declaration from observation, and a documented external
consumption path. All are met and were re-tested rather than assumed. Stable
requires two source-owned declarations from independent owners pinned to a
digest, an observer result from a third party, and a recorded incompatibility or
a recorded absence of one — stricter than the sentence it replaces.
Emission Cadence moves to candidate at document version 0.2.0. The wire contract
is untouched at schema version 0.1, and no field, form or validation rule
changes, so a producer conformant yesterday is conformant today.
What was given up: candidate carries no interoperability evidence at all. The
standard states that in its own section 10, naming that no consumer has
implemented the contract and that its worked example is not a source-owned
declaration. The gate now lives in the standard rather than only in SCOPE.md, so
a reader meets it where the contract is.
Recorded as INFO-DEC-2026-002 with the reasoning in history/. INFO-WP-0019
closes: all six tasks done.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Assistant: claude-code
Assistant-Model: opus
Assistant-Process: 3588@bnt-lap001
Assistant-Session: 24b80f66-e5a7-4e61-99fe-2d422e6d17da
tegwick
4d0851c3fc