The standing link board carried three jobs because only one of them had a surface. Re-measured before contracting, its 221 rows split into 178 booth announcements (156 already dead) and 43 non-booth rows, of which 8 are the same bench re-posted. U5 gave the booth announcement a home; this gives the running service one, and refuses the one shape that now has somewhere better to go. - booth/benches.py (new, stdlib-only and sibling-free): the Bench record, URL normalization as the identity, a lenient read on the render path and a strict read on the write path, atomic replace under an flock, and a stated total order (state rank, name casefolded, id). - links.booth_target: ONE predicate for "is this a booth URL", consumed by the CLI refusal, the board's dead marker and bench import. Host-agnostic, path-shaped, percent-decoded, never raises. - booth link refuses a booth URL, names `booth new --why`, and writes nothing — not the row, not the board directory, not the announcement. - The board marks rows whose booth has been swept. Nothing here deletes a row: removal stays the operator's two clicks through the existing bulk control. - booth bench add|ls|state|rm|import. import writes nothing without --apply and never edits links.md. - docs/archive/links-2026-09-22.md: the board archived verbatim into git. Identity is the FULL normalized URL, not the origin, and that was measured: origin identity collapses the 43 non-booth rows to 19 groups by merging eight distinct gitea repositories into one row, three unrelated HuggingFace model cards into one, and the two LRPG surfaces on 10.100.10.50:8321 — the design doc's own example of two real benches — into one. Full-URL identity still collapses both cases that doc names: talk 5 to 1, Peedlar 3 to 1. booth link is NOT deprecated. Roughly 14 of the 35 distinct non-booth targets are reference bookmarks for which the board is the right and only home; the design doc's plan to deprecate it would have evicted a third of its live content. Corrected there, along with what "normalized URL" means. The seam review found three real defects in the contract before any code: the claim that test_stdlib_only already forbids sibling imports (it exempts `booth` on purpose), naming resolve_booth as the dead marker's existence check (it raises HTTPException(404), so one swept booth would have 404'd the whole board page), and silence on percent-encoding (booth links are emitted through quote(name, safe=""), so a raw comparison marks every encoded booth dead forever). That both list_booths and sweep_once skip the registry was verified against the real functions rather than assumed. 444 -> 555 tests. Deployed and verified live: 23/23 booths 200, and the board renders 156 dead of 221 rows, matching an independent pre-implementation count. NOT TAGGED: both cold gates are in flight (contract review 01M35BWCJ806MT75NA630Y4WFH, code review 01M35CK8YKEKMV7T15JXEF6A8N) and the bug-hunt has not run. Per the v0.2.0 lesson, the tag waits for the gates.
150 lines
9.3 KiB
Markdown
150 lines
9.3 KiB
Markdown
# The Booth — roadmap
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Design: [`docs/design/information-architecture.md`](docs/design/information-architecture.md).
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Current version: `0.5.0` (U1 through U6 landed; extracted from eshpfi 2026-09-21).
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## v1 target
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What must be true to cut 1.0. Seven capabilities, each closing a **measured**
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defect — not a wish. The measurements are in the IA doc.
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| # | capability | closes | unit |
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|---|---|---|---|
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| 1 | ~~**One item record**~~ — **landed `ce598b3`** | captions never reach the zoom view (never sent, not lost) | U1 |
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| 2 | ~~**Marks**~~ — **landed `c7f9437`, released `v0.2.0`** | 5 mechanisms for 1 job; operator→session loop runs through chat | U2 |
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| 3 | ~~**Declared embed seam**~~ — **landed `87e2c53`, released `v0.5.0`** | 6 regexes injected into arbitrary author HTML, load-bearing for asks | U3 |
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| 4 | ~~**Derived lifetime**~~ — **landed `c3a97c1`, released `v0.4.0`** | 70% of booths on the `.forever` escape hatch (54% when first counted) | U4 |
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| 5 | ~~**Self-announcing booths**~~ — **landed `c015a91`, released `v0.3.0`** | job 5 had no home, so it lived on the link board as 145 dead rows | U5 |
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| 6 | ~~**Benches**~~ — registry, identity, enforced rule, migration | 69% link-board rot; the same bench posted 5× | U6 |
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| 7 | **Navigation at 270 items** — sections, rail, filters, grid keyboard | one flat wall; subfolder structure discarded at render | U7 |
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Ordering is dependency-driven, not priority-driven: **U1 → U2 → {U3, U4, U5} →
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U7**, with **U6 independent** of all of them (different storage, different
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surface) and therefore the safest thing to land first or in parallel.
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**U1 through U6 are landed.** **U7 is the last unit before the 1.0 cut** — its
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only dependency was `{U3, U4, U5}` and that closed with U3.
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⚠ **Before starting U7, read
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`persistent-memory.d/2026-09-21-u7-section-premise-half-wrong.md`, and re-count
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the booths first.** Half its premise is already known to be wrong — every booth
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that actually needs navigation is FLAT — and the booth set churned again on
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2026-09-22: the four large booths U7 was sized against (`pancake-v3-full` and
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`pancake-v4-full` at 270 items, `sindra20-engines`, `sindra-finalists`) have all
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been swept. The largest live booth is now `miranda-is` at 92 items, flat. Two of
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23 booths have subfolders (`pewpew-ui-brief`, `dfa-concepts`) and **both are
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reports** — the job where grid navigation matters least. Sections, one of U7's
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four named components, buys close to nothing. The rail, the filters and the grid
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keyboard are the unit.
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**U5's adoption is a measured prediction, not a finished result**, and it is
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TWO predictions rather than one. The operator declined a fleetwide announcement
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so that adoption could be told apart from design; within fifty minutes of the
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deploy a peer that had been told nothing (`comfy-dev`) created a booth and it
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announced itself with a handle and an empty `why`. That is the split:
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- **The handle rides for free.** It is written by `booth new` and `booth add`,
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so every existing caller starts announcing without learning anything.
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- **The `why` has to be learned.** It needs someone to know the flag exists.
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Both get re-measured on **2026-09-29**:
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find ~/booth-data -maxdepth 2 -name .booth.json | wc -l # free
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grep -l '"why": "[^"]' ~/booth-data/*/.booth.json | wc -l # learned
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A high first count with a near-zero second is the predicted shape of "nobody was
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told" — an adoption failure fixed by announcing, which is a different thing from
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nobody wanting it. Same instrument as U4's `.forever` prediction below.
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### Cross-cutting invariant — deterministic order, everywhere
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**Every ordered collection the Booth renders must have a stated, deterministic
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order.** Not "usually stable", not "whatever the filesystem yields" — a rule
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someone can name, that produces the same sequence on every render of the same
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state. The rule itself is free to be anything defensible: byte order over a
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path, creation time, an explicit number, even an arbitrary-but-recorded
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sequence. What is forbidden is *no rule*.
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This matters more here than in most services because the Booth's whole job is
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**comparison**. The operator is judging `pancake-v3-full` against
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`pancake-v4-full`, tile 47 against tile 47. If the order shifts between two page
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loads — or differs between the gallery, the zoom ring, the zip manifest and the
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`marks` read — then every positional reference the operator makes ("the third
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one from the left", "the one after the banded one") is silently wrong, and a
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flag or a note lands on the wrong artifact. Non-determinism does not present as
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a bug report; it presents as the operator's judgment being quietly misfiled.
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Where it already binds, and what the rule is in each case:
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| collection | rule |
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|---|---|
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| items in a booth | `sorted(rel)` — byte order over the booth-relative path (U1 INV-3) |
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| the zoom prev/next ring | the item order, filtered to images — same sequence, one source |
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| caption sidecar resolution | sorted scan, so two media files sharing a stem resolve the same way every time (a real non-determinism U1 removed) |
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| marks in a booth | `(created, id)` — time, with the id as tie-break so two marks written in the same second cannot swap |
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| legacy ask import | `(mtime, name)`, which is the order `list_asks` gave them |
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| link board rows | pinned first, then newest-first |
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| a booth's announcement | not a collection — one flat record per booth, nothing to order (U5) |
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| the bench registry | `(state rank, name casefolded, id)` — live before promoted before retired, then alphabetical, with the id as a TOTAL tie-break so two benches sharing a name cannot swap (U6) |
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| the link board's dead marker | not an order — a per-row stamp read from the existing `order_for_display` sequence, so marking cannot move a row (U6) |
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| embed anchors in a verbatim report | **document order** — what `querySelectorAll` yields, so the author's markup decides (U3) |
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| the embed tail (fragments the author did not place) | **payload order**, which is the marks order `(created, id)` — one rule, whether a fragment lands at an anchor or at the end (U3) |
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| questions within a pick | declaration order, in the payload's `questions` LIST — carried by the format rather than by object-key insertion order (U3) |
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U3's three rows are the first case where the rule binds across a language
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boundary: the order is decided in Python and honoured in JavaScript, and a
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browser test asserts it rather than a string assertion that could not see it.
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U4 added no ordered collection — a booth's lifetime is one state per booth,
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not a sequence — so the rule above did not need a new row. The three lifetime
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surfaces (index card, booth header, marks page) render through ONE macro
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precisely so they cannot disagree, which is the same property stated for
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ordering: one rule, one place, every surface reading it.
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Where it is still to be decided, and must be before the unit ships: **U7's
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section ordering and its compare pairing** (sections need a stated order among
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themselves, not just within; pairing by filename needs a rule for what happens
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to an unpaired file). **U6's bench listing is settled** — the row above.
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Compare pairing is parked to v1.1 with compare mode itself, so U7 carries one
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undecided rule, not two.
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The test for any new ordered surface: *can you write the rule down in one line?*
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If not, it does not have one yet.
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### Explicitly NOT in v1
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- **Backward compatibility with the `ask` CLI verbs.** Pre-1.0, and `ask` /
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`asks` / `answer` become thin aliases over `marks` rather than a second code
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path. The 17 consuming handles get one althing note naming the change — the
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one case where telling peers is real coordination and not a broadcast.
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- **A migration that deletes anything.** `links.md` is archived verbatim and
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committed before the registry is seeded from it.
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## Parking lot
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Deferred with a home, per the anti-creep gate. Default is park; these were
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weighed against the v1 path and lost on purpose.
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| item | why parked |
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| **Compare mode** — pair-by-name A/B across subfolders | The best idea in the set, and the only one that is a *new capability* rather than a fix for a measured defect. The four-booth `pancake-v3/v4` dance still works. First thing in v1.1. |
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| Virtualized / progressive grid loading | Speculative. 270 `<img loading="lazy">` may be fine. **Measure the real booth before optimising it** — if it renders inside a second, this is invented work. |
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| Bench uptime history + graphs | The v1 need is "is it dead", which one flag answers. A time series is a different product. |
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| Cross-booth search | No evidence of the need in the usage data. |
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| Per-viewer state (who has seen what) | The Booth has one viewer. Revisit if that stops being true. |
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| Auth | Standing non-goal. LAN/mesh-internal. Blur stays cosmetic and says so. |
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## Post-v1, already committed
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- **SVOS theme retrofit by `design-dev`.** Runs as a parallel track, not a v1
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gate: we own the information architecture (it is driven by the measurement
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above), design-dev owns the visual and interaction system. The handoff is a
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`/vor-ui` brief written against the landed v1 structure — the same shape
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`hamr-dev` and `pewpew-dev` used.
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## Gate
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A proposed feature is on the v1 path or it is parked. **Default: parked.** When
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both are defensible, park it — same asymmetry as the patch-default in SemVer.
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Applies regardless of who proposed it.
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