epiphany/crates/epiphany-bundle
Levi Neuwirth ee18b71aca Text Projection 0.2.0: the gate was lossy, and the cause was one missing rule
A review found the 0.1.0 companion lossy for documents that are valid today. Its
claim to preserve the manifest's canonical roots was false three ways:

  A canonical blob had no representation at all. blob_roots referenced by
  canonical operations or reduced state ARE canonical roots, and the document
  structure had no blob line. An embedded image, font or recording would vanish
  from a projection silently -- the operations referencing it still there,
  pointing at a blob id the text no longer contained.

  An ExtensionDeclaration lost its semantic version and its affected_object_kinds
  outright, and left its preserved_chunk_roots undefined.

  ProfileId::Custom(ProfileRegistryId) was unrepresentable: a symbol was required
  where sixteen registry bytes are carried.

All three share one cause I had not named. A ChunkRef and a BlobRef are PHYSICAL
references -- offset, compressed length, compression -- which the projection may
not preserve; and they carry DERIVABLE identities -- ChunkId, ContentHash, BlobId
-- which it may not duplicate. Having no rule for either, I dropped the
references and took their contents with them.

req:textproj:derive-or-carry states it, and it is the same rule
req:textproj:reduced-state-derived already applied one level up: carry exactly
what the document does not determine, and nothing it does. Physical attributes
never appear; derivable identities never appear; content and semantic attributes
always do. The one non-derivable identity in schema major 0 is SnapshotId, which
the Binary Format companion pins as opaque and forbids readers to derive -- an
exception for a stated reason rather than an oversight. The grammar now visibly
contains no offset, no length, no compression, no chunk id, no hash, no blob id.

So: req:textproj:canonical-blobs (canonical blobs projected, non-canonical ones
not), req:textproj:profile-id ((custom #x...)), req:textproj:extension-declaration
(every field; chunks as kind + schema + payload, never as a ChunkRef -- the
projection has no file to point into), and req:textproj:base-snapshot-inline
extended to say what the inlined payload IS and that the root ChunkRef and the
SnapshotRef hash are re-derived from hash(Snapshot, schema, payload), never read.

The gap started upstream. core_spec's own list of what the projection preserves
omitted canonical blobs while classifying blob_roots as canonical roots -- an
inconsistency inside one document. Corrected there, along with withdrawing the
permission to reference a base snapshot "externally", which the inline
ratification had already made untenable.

Also: the generated PDF metadata and page header still said Operation Catalog,
inherited from the copied preamble.

The four 0.1.0 ratifications stand unchanged. Implementation stays deferred: a
gate that is lossy is not a gate.

Gate: clippy 0, 31 targets / 1031 passed / 0 failed, conformance 8/8, zero golden
churn; core_spec, binary_format, operation_catalog and text_projection all build
with no undefined references.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-07-09 21:34:36 -04:00
..
examples A B C D F 2026-06-19 12:42:31 -04:00
src One tag vocabulary the compiler owns, and ratify the corpus in the companion 2026-07-09 20:32:35 -04:00
tests A B C D F 2026-06-19 12:42:31 -04:00
Cargo.toml Pushes 1+3: fix the MUST-level violations, wire the types-only machinery 2026-07-02 17:10:50 -04:00
DECISIONS.md Text Projection 0.2.0: the gate was lossy, and the cause was one missing rule 2026-07-09 21:34:36 -04:00
README.md Pushes 1+3: fix the MUST-level violations, wire the types-only machinery 2026-07-02 17:10:50 -04:00

README.md

epiphany-bundle

The Epiphany .musc file format, implementing the normative requirements of Chapter 8 (File Format) of the core specification (spec/core_spec.pdf). This is Agent D's crate per spec/QUICKSTART.md. It depends on epiphany-determinism (Agent A) and on nothing else — not on epiphany-core (Agent B) or epiphany-ops (Agent C):

bundles handle bytes, ops handles semantics. A canonical-base snapshot from the bundle's perspective is opaque bytes plus a frontier DVV; only epiphany-ops interprets it. — QUICKSTART

A bundle is a single file: a fixed 64-byte header at offset 0, two 256-byte superblock slots, then a body of immutable, content-addressed chunks. The superblocks are the only mutable on-disk objects. A commit appends new chunks, writes a new manifest chunk, then flips the active superblock by writing the inactive slot and durably flushing it — that flush is the commit point. Because commits only ever append and touch the inactive slot, a crash can never corrupt the active state.

What's here

Area Items Spec
Prelude FixedHeader (64 B, CRC-32C), Superblock/CommitState (256 B, CRC-32C), select_active Ch. 8 §"The Bundle Layout", §"Superblock Selection"
Atomic commit Bundle::create/open/commit, the 7-step protocol, cold-open path Ch. 8 §"The Atomic Write Protocol", §"Streaming Reads"
Content addressing chunk_content_hash/chunk_id, ChunkRef, ChunkKind, CompressionAlgorithm, domain separation Ch. 8 §"Content Hashing", §"Chunks"
Manifest Manifest (canonical_base ≠ acceleration_snapshots), SnapshotRef, BlobRef, ProfileDeclaration, ExtensionDeclaration Ch. 8 §"The Manifest"
Retention RetentionPolicy (first-class), ProfileConstraints Ch. 8 §"Garbage Collection and Retention"
Op blocks pack_operation_blocks (1 MiB soft target), encode_block/decode_block Ch. 8 §"Operation Envelope Blocks"
Storage BlockStore, MemStore, FileStore (real fsync), FaultStore (crash sim) Ch. 8 §"Durable Writes"
Gates fuzz::run_crash_recovery_fuzz, fuzz::exhaustive_crash_check, fuzz::run_manifest_selection_harness QUICKSTART acceptance

The crash-recovery contract (the acceptance gate)

Kill the process between any two syscalls in the commit protocol; reopen; the bundle must be valid in 100% of runs, and must recover to the previous generation when the crash precedes the durable flush. This is the most important single test in the entire prototype. — QUICKSTART, Agent D

Killing a real process between syscalls cannot be made deterministic, so the fuzzer drives the commit against a FaultStore that distinguishes live (page-cache) bytes from durable (survives-a-crash) bytes and can crash after any chosen syscall — optionally tearing the in-flight superblock write, the case the slot CRC must catch. After every simulated crash the bundle is reopened from the durable image and must:

  1. open successfully (never corrupt);
  2. be at the previous generation or the new one, never anything else;
  3. if the commit returned Ok, be at the new generation; and if the crash was clean (the in-flight flush persisted nothing) and the commit did not complete, be at the previous generation — the exact "recover to the previous generation when the crash precedes the durable flush" property. (A torn final flush may at a full prefix legitimately persist the whole superblock — the genuine post-commit case — so the torn branch admits either generation.)
  4. report no integrity anomaly;
  5. have every canonical chunk present and hash-intact.

Two drivers exercise this: a randomized 10,000-iteration sweep, and an exhaustive per-commit sweep that tests every syscall boundary crossed with every tear point (clean, and torn at prefixes around the 252-byte CRC offset and the 256-byte slot size). The second leaves no step of the protocol untested.

The companion manifest_selection gate asserts the Chapter 8 superblock- selection rule across every corruption scenario the QUICKSTART enumerates: slot A corrupt + B valid (and vice versa), both valid at generation+1, both valid at the same generation (equivalent, and divergent), a generation gap > 1, a non-committed slot, a manifest-hash mismatch, and neither valid.

Building and testing

cargo test -p epiphany-bundle                              # unit + the two gates
cargo clippy -p epiphany-bundle --all-targets -- -D warnings
cargo run --release --example fuzz_crash -- 1000000        # extended crash soak

Hand-off criteria (QUICKSTART, Agent D)

  • cargo test clean.
  • Crash-recovery fuzzer passes 10,000 iterations (crash_recovery_fuzz_ten_thousand_iterations, two seeds; extended soak via the example binary; exhaustive per-syscall sweep in exhaustive_sweep_across_base_states_and_commit_shapes).
  • Manifest-selection harness handles every corruption scenario (every_selection_scenario_holds).
  • Real-filesystem fsync round-trip (file_store_real_fsync_round_trip).

Scope boundaries (per QUICKSTART "Don't do these")

v0 writes only uncompressed chunks (compression on the write path is deferred), but reading zstd-compressed chunks and blobs is supported, per the spec's §Compression MUST (the manifest is mandatory-uncompressed regardless, and a compressed manifest is rejected). It carries the text-projection root but does not implement the s-expression projection content, and it preserves extension declarations and chunks but does not evaluate edit barriers — barrier operands (OperationKindTag, ObjectKind, EditBarrier) are owned by Agents C and E. Operation envelopes, snapshots, and causal frontiers are opaque bytes here.

See DECISIONS.md for the prototype byte-layout choices that anticipate the deferred Binary Format companion, and the batched Pass 11 candidates.