TheRON
bac6120605
STAGING-STATE recorded mechcomp.service as delivered at deploy/mechcomp.service on 11 SEP. The unit was real; the directory was not. It existed only on CT 100, so the repository claimed to hold something it did not, and the only way to answer a question about the service was to read the container. The nginx vhost had never been committed at all. Both imported verbatim as they ran on 12 SEP, with their host checksums proven equal at import. A first commit of a configuration file records reality, not intentions -- every later improvement is then a diff against a known-good starting point rather than a rewrite nobody can check. mechcomp.env is deliberately absent. It is the one file that is supposed to differ between instances, it is root:mechcomp 0640 because a deployment's bindings belong to the deployment, and a committed copy would create a second source of truth for exactly the wrong file. ENVIRONMENT.md documents the keys. Certificates and keys likewise. IDENTITY-CONTRACT.md is the boundary between this application and the membership system, and the only document here written to be read by someone who does not work on this repository. Two systems that must agree on an interface need it written once, somewhere both can point at. The compiler does not authenticate anyone; it is told. CT 101 decides, against the membership system, and sets X-Kane-Auth-Email and X-Kane-Auth-Method. They map onto Author.email and Author.method, which already exist and are tested. The parser's refusal to recover `verified` from text was built for this: a record read back is always self-declared, because a file cannot attest to its own verification. The decision belongs at CT 101 and never at wg-pk. The hub carries twenty peers and is estate infrastructure this project does not own, so authorisation there would make every future adjustment an escalation and would teach a shared transport about one project's membership roll. CT 101 already shares the service bridge with CT 100 and CT 102. One gated prefix, /m/. nginx gets one location block, written once. Gating a new endpoint afterwards is choosing a URL in Python -- no proxy change, no escalation. That cheapness makes the placement of the line reversible rather than structural. Today it sits at export: the catalogue and composer are open, and what requires membership is producing an artifact whose design record names an author. Section 6 is the part most likely to erode and is written hardest. The compiler must never learn what a building is, what a membership level is, or that group names exist -- including as a configuration value, which is how the leak arrives by the side door. The test is that the membership system can rename every level and replace its storage without a line of this repository being read. Section 9 deletes the ACL from the roadmap rather than deferring it. The compiler will not have a user table, a login form or a session. Recorded openly rather than assumed: the service is world-reachable and unauthenticated, /m/ is not yet gated, and STL export will therefore ship open. Same posture the whole service already has. The earlier justification -- "acceptable for a development name" -- was wrong and is corrected separately: dev.mechcomp.kane-il.us is production, dev abbreviates Mechanical Compiler Developers, and the name is on printed material. The inbound header strip depends on none of this and should land on its own. It costs one directive and removes a forgery that becomes possible the moment the headers mean anything.
Mechanical Compiler
Build the capacity to construct real structures from reclaimed and commodity materials, using whatever fabrication is actually to hand — 3D printing, tabletop CNC, welding, cement casting, COTS stock.
The reference case is a faceted timber shell: planar panels meeting along straight fold lines, converging on nodes, sitting on a platform. Buildable without a factory, provided someone has worked out what the pieces are and how they meet. That last clause is the project. The Mechanical Compiler exists to make the pieces computable, qualifiable, and reproducible by someone who was not present when they were designed.
Scope
In scope: geometry, qualification, and reproducibility of structural members and their interfaces.
Not in scope: building codes, permitting, jurisdictional approval. Qualification and compliance are different things. A qualification says this member is what it claims to be, made this way, from this stock. Compliance is a jurisdiction-specific argument someone else may build on top.
The project records physical claims, never verdicts — section modulus, moment of inertia, material provenance, process parameters. Those are what any future argument would need. A pass/fail verdict would bake in a jurisdiction we do not want to be bound to. Measure and attest; never adjudicate.
Repository layout
docs/ specification, state, failure log, roadmap
legacy/openscad/ rev 8.0.0 generators — reference, not a live target
fixtures/ frozen acceptance oracles
tools/reference-toolchain/ pinned OpenSCAD + BOSL2, build-time only
src/mechcomp/ the application
tests/ acceptance against the oracle
Read docs/ROADMAP.md first for what this is, then docs/ENVIRONMENT.md for
how an instance is built. If you are writing provisioning automation, read
docs/FAILURES.md before the specification — every entry is something a
script written from the specification alone would have got wrong.
Getting started
make deps # virtualenv, base + CAD requirements
make verify-oracle # confirm the frozen oracle is intact
make test # pytest -n auto
make verify-oracle needs nothing but Python. It should pass on any machine at
any time; if it does not, stop.
The oracle
fixtures/strap-beam-8.0.0/ holds 123 frozen cases — 113 accepted, 10
rejected — produced by OpenSCAD 2021.01 with BOSL2 at 92d697c2. It is the
acceptance criterion for any reimplementation of the generators.
The ten rejected cases are part of the contract. A port that accepts them is wrong, however good its numbers look elsewhere. It is easy to reproduce the geometry and quietly lose the constraint that made it trustworthy.
The generators under legacy/openscad/ are the reference implementation, kept
so the oracle can be regenerated. They are not a live target and the running
application has no OpenSCAD dependency.
Provenance
This project's documents, code and roadmap are LLM-generated under human direction. That is stated plainly here and in any downstream submission. We do not obscure it.
The maintainer reviews and owns every line. Anything that could not be defended in a review thread does not ship.
Licence
AGPL-3.0-or-later. See LICENSE.
Section 13 obliges us to offer source to users interacting over a network, so any deployed web tier carries a visible link back to this repository. That is a licence obligation, not a courtesy.