Architecture Decision Records

Decisions made along the way, recorded together with their rationale. To overturn a decision, mark its ADR as Superseded and add a new one; existing ADRs are never rewritten. Each record is kept in the language it was originally written in.

ADR	Decision	Status
0001	Own the toolchain, delegate dependency supply	Accepted
0002	No resident daemon	Accepted
0003	Split the manifest into dowel.toml and dowel.build	Accepted
0004	The syntax is a TOML-style dialect; borrow elements whose semantics match existing languages	Accepted
0005	Migration is dynamic extraction only; no static translation	Accepted
0006	Use dowel as a provisional name	Superseded by 0014
0007	Implement in Rust; the core uses the standard library only	Accepted
0008	Runner transfer paths are positional; no string interpolation	Accepted
0009	FileId is the hash of the normalized path	Accepted
0010	check runs through the planning stage	Accepted
0011	Derived fingerprints exclude spans; provenance reads bypass the memo	Accepted
0012	The store holds evaluation results only; files with diagnostics are not stored	Accepted
0013	dowel acquires itself via a separate binary; references are pinned to commit shas	Accepted
0014	Adopt dowel as the official name	Accepted
0015	Resolve version dependencies through pkg-config, record them in dowel.lock	Accepted
0016	The language standard is a typed property merged by maximum	Accepted
0017	Features belong to the package that declares them; dep/feature forwards	Accepted
0018	The output stage is a backend layer over one neutral build graph	Accepted
0019	abi = "c" names a boundary, not a language	Accepted
0020	pkg.name / pkg.version are package constants, readable in value position	Accepted
0021	Features stay additive; exclusivity is declared, never inferred	Accepted
0022	A test target registers cases; dowel imposes no harness	Accepted
0023	The harness protocol is declared; dowel learns no test framework	Accepted
0024	dowel debug starts a declared debugger; the stub is declared, not guessed	Accepted
0025	bench measures whole-process wall-clock time; no framework is imposed	Accepted
0026	The target’s OS and architecture are vocabulary of their own, derived from the triple	Accepted
0027	A toolchain declares its argument style; dowel spells what it assembles, and translates nothing else	Accepted
0028	What was asked of a tool is recorded outside the project, keyed by the tool’s identity	Accepted
0029	An archive dependency is pinned by its contents; fetching is delegated, verification is not	Accepted