Decision 9 (news vs obligations) gets a proposed direction in a new §9.2, following
how §9.1 promoted the retention decision.
The load-bearing part is the negative result. The tempting fix — let terminal
directed events into the owed set so a report addressed to a device reaches it —
breaks the derivation's fixed point. Owed-ness is "directed at me, not mine, and
not joined by a later terminal event of mine", so the asserting shape (open) and
the clearing shape (terminal) have to be disjoint. Make terminal events owed and a
reply becomes owed by its requester, whose closure is itself directed + terminal
and therefore owed by the original author: every closure mints a fresh obligation
and the loop never terminates. status="open" is not editorial taste about tone, it
is what makes owed-ness terminate. Worth writing down before someone "fixes" it.
The proposal itself avoids the cost that sinks the naive version. "Since your last
session" implies a per-device read cursor, and container-local state is exactly
what --force-recreate erases. No new state is needed: the device's own last
authored event is already a cursor, it lives in the shared log, and it is
comparable across replicas for the same reason the owed-set join now uses hlc
(§7.3). Named the non-obvious constraint too — the anchor must be computed PER
STREAM, because a global one lets a chatty stream advance past unread news in a
quiet one, and that failure is silent.
Also tightened §7.12: candidacy requires exactly `open`, not merely "non-terminal",
so a `claimed` announcement is as undelivered as a finished report. Claiming still
earns its keep on handoff-prone work (it is what distinguishes "nobody started"
from "someone started and the container died"), but its audience is a log reader,
not the requester — and it does not quiet the claimer's own mailbox either, which
is what the state machine's "open --> claimed does NOT clear" already implies.
joakimp
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