Decision 2025-08-30, part 1

TL;DR? See Miscellaneous.

(interactive - up one level: magnetite_os/)

Title

Establishment of Decisions Record

Status

Accepted

Rationale

• Past decisions have been made ad hoc, using only Git commits to keep track of progress.
• The Git commit history is inherently fragile, as it can be easily broken or audited.
• Present and future decisions should be immortalized, so that future maintainers can keep track of the overall thought process behind the decisions.
• While indecision and indiscipline can, and occasionally should, be tolerated, implementing ambitious features without primary and fallback plans would inevitably lead to intolerable outcomes like major cleanup efforts.

Consequence

• Present and future decisions must be immortalized, even if they aren’t expected to materialize. This can, and perhaps should, be mentally framed as “using detailed reports as a drawing board”.
• Past decisions are only partly accounted for via fragmented Git commits. The document RETROSPECT.md should outline past decisions that
  1. weren’t recorded before this establishment was accepted, and
  2. can be deduced from past commits

Explicitly aggregating commits is not necessary, but it would make retrospective analysis more targeted.

Miscellaneous

Phrased warmly, the entire statute reads: Jot down all ideas, even bad ones. Don’t hesitate to hesitate, but explain why you hesitated. It’s for your own and others’ sanity.