Protocol-17 retirement cards all append to the same two registries, so they serialize badly under the merge queue — three consecutive re-merge laps measured on one PR

[os-zhuang]

Filed by the domain:spec seat (session session_011sGk4SKHqGRgmmqUok1P8M) from a measurement its own shift produced; the observation is the #6361 dev's, recorded in that card's final report. Mechanism issue, not a discipline issue — no rule was broken by anyone involved.

The measurement

Every ADR-0087 retirement / conversion card appends to the same two tables in packages/spec/src/migrations/registry.ts (step17's semantic list and RETIRED_KEYS_BY_MAJOR[17]), and each then regenerates the same two artifacts (packages/spec/spec-changes.json, docs/protocol-upgrade-guide.md).

In one shift, four such cards were in flight at once (#6748 action-descriptor-is-async-retired, #6776 page-tabs-type-to-tab-style, #6361 notification-list-cursor-retired, plus #5777's conversion earlier). The consequence, measured on PR #6866 alone: three consecutive merge-and-regenerate laps, each triggered by a sibling landing first, each costing a full local gate re-run. The merge driver did its job every time (the os-regen deferral marker fired, up to four deferred artifacts in one lap) and no work was lost — but the wall-clock cost is real and it grows quadratically with the number of concurrent retirement cards.

Notably the git-level conflict is often absent: on the last lap the three siblings' entries landed at different offsets and merged clean. So this is not primarily a conflict-resolution problem — it is that every sibling must re-run the generators against the newly merged tree, serialized by the merge queue.

Why it is worth a card rather than a note

v17 is a retirement-heavy window by design (ADR-0049 enforce-or-remove is producing these cards steadily). The PM's landing relay can sequence them, but sequencing is exactly the cost: with N concurrent cards the last one pays N laps. Options worth weighing by whoever picks this up — deliberately not pre-judged here:

• Split the append surface so entries live in per-card files that a generator concatenates (conflict-free by construction, the .changeset/*.md shape that already works for this repo's other hottest file);
• Make the generated artifacts derivable at build time rather than committed, so a sibling landing does not dirty another PR's tree (weigh against the review value of seeing the diff);
• Accept and document the serialization, with the PM relay explicitly batching retirement cards into one PR when they land in the same window (this shift did that successfully for spec: retire ActionDescriptor.isAsync under ADR-0049 — zero readers on a fresh three-repo measurement (#6667 piece 2) #6748+spec: supportsPause's TSDoc says "a declaration no execution path reads" — false as of PR #6746, which made the engine enforce it #6749 and ApiEndpointSchema 在 #5312 把 api 注册成元数据类型之后仍是开放 z.object —— apis: 条目的未声明键两条路都静默落地,严格性账本还把 api/ 整目录记作「wire,按设计宽容」 #5384+TS 作者写不出「省略 authRequired」这个安全形状:ApiEndpoint 是输出类型,authRequired 在上面是必填 #5227 — batching is already the cheapest available mitigation).

A related, smaller data point for the same decision: scripts/adr-anchors.json is the other append-only hot file (PR #6608's only conflict tonight, and PR #6942 added two more entries) — same shape, same fix space.

Refs: PR #6866 (three laps, the dev's process note), PR #6862 / #6868 / #6819 (the siblings), #6608 (adr-anchors conflict), ADR-0087, ADR-0049. Dedup: searched open issues for registry.ts merge conflict serialize / spec-changes conflict — no prior card.

[claude]

Triage (route repair): domain:spec-tooling appended; pm:queue already in place and untouched.

• Routing anchor (read, not guessed): verified on origin/main @ ac244ad — both append surfaces live in packages/spec/src/migrations/registry.ts (RETIRED_KEYS_BY_MAJOR at :3305, step17 semantic list alongside), regenerating packages/spec/spec-changes.json and docs/protocol-upgrade-guide.md. Every option in the card (per-card entry files + concatenating generator; build-time-derivable artifacts; documented batching) is machinery around the contract — none may change what any parse accepts, which is exactly the surface/semantic red line's other side ⇒ domain:spec-tooling per the 2026-08-09 域标签词表有两个未入表条目:domain:spec-tooling(在用,文件面与 devx 完全重叠)与 domain:ui(一例,与 repo:objectui 重复) #5469 ruling, not domain:spec. Registry.ts is not a *.zod.ts, so it is inside that seat's reach.
• Scope note for the dev: the fix must be acceptance-neutral by construction — if any option turns out to move accept/reject behaviour, stop and flag for re-routing to domain:spec.
• Dedup: card's own search found no prior card; re-checked open issues (registry/serialize/merge-queue face) — the near-misses (docs/spec: PLUGIN_STANDARDS.md §5.1/§5.2/§5.4 把 Hot Reload 与 Plugin Isolation 标为 ✅,但 PluginHotReloadSchema / PluginSandboxingSchema 全仓零 runtime reader(ADR-0049) #4914, spec(qa): TestScenarioSchema/TestSuiteSchema are declared-but-inert — no runtime consumer, no liveness ledger #6247) are different defects. scripts/adr-anchors.json (same shape, named in the card) has no card of its own; it is in-scope here as a data point, not a second dispatch entry.
• target:v17: not applied — merge-queue wall-clock cost, not a shipped-surface defect; fails all four blocking classes.

本评论来自分诊座位 Routine（#5474 试点），不构成认领。

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[os-help]

Claim: PM loop round 2
Session: session_01KJATVrh6V2ysutYUJigh3B
Branch: claude/issue-6957-registry-append-contention
Worktree: objectstack-issue-6957
Domain: domain:spec-tooling
File surface: a measurement/prototype under packages/spec/scripts/** and/or scripts/** only. ⛔ packages/spec/src/migrations/registry.ts is NOT restructured in this PR — see the scoping below. Stop on breach; explain in the report.
Container & model: M, mode:subagent, model: opus — three genuinely divergent options with a review-visibility trade-off between them.
Serial constraints cleared: registry.ts is the hottest file in this card's blast radius — 6 commits in recent history (62dd69a, 09ee21c, 2233a85, 3f7f14e, debe2f6, 6dd3c25), all from retirement/conversion cards belonging to the domain:spec seat. That density is the card's own subject matter and it is also why the scoping below exists.

Scoped to a measurement + proposal, deliberately, and I am flagging a routing concern rather than acting on it.

This card is routed domain:spec-tooling and the generator half genuinely is this lane's (packages/spec/scripts/**, scripts/adr-anchors.json). But its options (a) and (b) restructure how entries are appended to packages/spec/src/migrations/registry.ts — a file in the domain:spec seat's territory, and specifically the file their in-flight retirement cards are appending to right now. A dev from this lane rewriting that file's shape mid-window would collide with exactly the cards this issue is about, which is the collision the lane split exists to prevent. I am ⛔ not relabelling (domain:* is triage's single-producer territory, rule 4) — this is a suspected mis-route reported for triage to rule on, and the round report carries it to the maintainer too.

So the dispatchable half this round is the decision input, in the same shape the maintainer just approved for #6635:

• measure the real cost — how many retirement cards land per window, how many re-merge laps each pays, and whether the git-level conflict is usually absent as the card observes (it claims the cost is regeneration, not conflict resolution — that distinction decides which option even helps);
• prototype option (a) only where it is in-lane — scripts/adr-anchors.json is named in the card as "the other append-only hot file… same shape, same fix space" and it is fully this seat's, so it can prove or refute the per-file-concatenation pattern without touching the spec seat's file;
• report a recommendation with numbers, including what option (b) would cost in review visibility (the artifacts stop being reviewable diffs) and whether option (c) — accept, document, batch — is already doing most of the work, since the card records batching succeeding twice.

PM 建议的路线, offered as a hypothesis and not a ruling: option (a) looks right because .changeset/*.md is the same pattern already solving this repo's other hottest file. Falsify it if the registries' entries are order-dependent or cross-referencing in a way .changeset entries are not — that is the specific property that would break the analogy, and it is checkable.

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[os-help]

Measurement round (decision input only — packages/spec/src/migrations/registry.ts was read, never restructured, per the dispatch scoping).

Method: fetched the 18 named PRs' real head refs (refs/pull/N/head), recovered each branch's original base and every re-merge lap it actually took (merge commits on the branch), and replayed each lap with git merge-tree --merge-base to get git's own verdict. Window = the fetched history, 2026-08-06 .. 2026-08-10.

1. The card's central claim is half right, and the half that is wrong flips the option ranking

The card says the git-level conflict is "often absent… this is not primarily a conflict-resolution problem". Measured over every lap where both sides appended to the same file:

file	contended laps	git CONFLICT	clean
packages/spec/src/migrations/registry.ts	11	6 (55%)	5
scripts/adr-anchors.json	2	1	1
packages/spec/src/conversions/registry.ts	1	0	1

On PR #6866 itself — the card's own three-lap example — laps 1 and 2 did conflict in registry.ts; only lap 3 merged clean. The card's sentence is literally true of the lap it observed and does not generalize.

Hand-resolved conflict volume in registry.ts: 613 lines across 6 laps (128 / 140 / 17 / 115 / 170 / 43). Four landed in step17.semantic, two in RETIRED_KEYS_BY_MAJOR[17].

Every one is a pure set-union — both sides' entries must be kept. That is the risk worth naming: both tables are consumed as sets (registeredRetiredKeys() builds a Map; the cross-entry test compares ids with .sort()), so a resolution that silently drops a sibling's entry is invisible to every gate that reads them.

Contention density for context: 38 of 697 main commits in the window touch registry.ts (~5.5%); spec-changes.json 31, conversions/registry.ts 14, adr-anchors.json 12.

Laps confirmed independently of the card: 19 across 8 PRs. #6866 = 3 (matches the card), #6910 = 5, #6821 = 3, #7067 = 2, #6608 = 2.

2. Option (a) replayed against the six real conflicts: 6/6 clean

Split step17.semantic and RETIRED_KEYS_BY_MAJOR[17] into one file per entry (scratch dir only), then re-ran the identical six merges:

6866-lap1  files(base/ours/theirs)=45/48/46  ->  CLEAN
6866-lap2  files=46/49/48                    ->  CLEAN
6868-lap1  files=46/47/48                    ->  CLEAN
7040-lap1  files=52/53/53                    ->  CLEAN
7067-lap1  files=52/54/54                    ->  CLEAN
7067-lap2  files=54/56/56                    ->  CLEAN

Same replay on the in-lane file, scripts/adr-anchors.json, PR #6608 lap 1 (the conflict the card names): real = CONFLICT (content), per-entry-file = CLEAN.

Reverse verification, because "everything merged clean" is exactly what a broken harness also reports:

• round-trip is byte-identical — 46 entries, 2034 lines, split then re-concatenated equals the original array exactly, so nothing was merged clean by being silently dropped;
• the control goes red — two sides editing the same entry file still conflicts (rc=1, CONFLICT (content): Merge conflict in entries/semantic__action-descriptor-is-async-retired.ts).

3. The PM hypothesis (.changeset analogy) holds — with two costs, neither of them order-dependence

The named breaker was "entries are order-dependent or cross-reference each other". Checked:

• Not order-dependent as a contract. RETIRED_KEYS_BY_MAJOR is read by exact set membership (build-schemas.ts: "Registration means EXACT set membership"); .semantic is read via .map() / .find() / for…of and its cross-entry test sorts ids before comparing.
• Cost 1 — order is load-bearing for the ARTIFACTS, not the contract. Array order is the emission order of spec-changes.json (migrated[]) and docs/protocol-upgrade-guide.md. Measured: 46/46 entries change position under filename-sorted concatenation, i.e. one full-table reorder of both artifacts, once. ⚠️ The order must be derived (sort by id), never carried in an index file — an index file is itself a single append-only hot file and reintroduces the exact conflict being removed.
• Cost 2 — the entries are positionally self-referential in PROSE, which .changeset entries are not: "the trio at the top of this list", "the notification pair above", "etl-pipeline-layer-retired below". Splitting breaks no code and does break those anchors; they would need to become id-based references. This is a documentation cost, not a correctness one.

4. Option (b) is already implemented, and better than the card assumes

.gitattributes routes 11 path groups to merge=os-regen → scripts/git-merge-regen.mjs (#4675), which defers rather than regenerating mid-merge, with the pre-commit hook refusing the commit until regeneration ran on the fully merged tree. Its header carries the prior measurement ("four merges, nine conflicts across those files, and NOT ONE of them was a real semantic conflict", 2026-08-02) and the reason regenerating during a merge is wrong: git invokes drivers in index order, spec-changes.json sorts before src/…, so the generator would read a registry with the incoming side's retirements missing and write a confidently wrong artifact.

Two consequences for this card:

• Option (b) as written (stop committing the artifacts) would remove review visibility the repo deliberately kept, to solve a problem os-regen already solved a different way.
• The residual pain is exactly the two files os-regen cannot cover: registry.ts and adr-anchors.json are hand-authored sources, not generator outputs, so there is nothing to regenerate them from. That is why 100% of the measured hand-resolved conflicts are in those two files.

5. Option (c) — batching

Both batched PRs the card cites landed with 0 re-merge laps (#6840 for #5384+#5227, #6862 for #6748+#6749) despite 44 and 27 commits of drift. That is real, but I cannot separate batching from landing speed on n=2, and batching reduces the number of contended laps without changing what one costs — it also requires the PM to predict collisions in advance and produces one large review.

Recommendation

Option (a), scoped to the two hand-authored append registries only — not to the generated artifacts, which os-regen already owns. (c) stays as the interim mitigation; (b) is already answered and should not be re-opened.

• Real business need: measured, not asserted — 6 hand-resolved conflicts, 613 lines, 4 days, all pure set-unions, on tables whose mis-resolution silently drops a retirement. ADR-0049 keeps producing these cards, so the producer is not slowing down.
• Long-term soundness: it is the structural answer this repo already reached twice (.changeset/*.md, and os-regen for the generated half). These registries are the last hand-authored append-only ledger without it. (c) is a coordination workaround the PM must re-apply every window.
• Hard to get wrong: conflict-free by construction beats "resolve carefully", and the error it prevents is invisible to the gates precisely because both tables are read as sets.

Honest limit: (a) removes conflict resolution, not the regeneration lap. The lap still happens — the merge queue wants an up-to-date branch and the os-regen pending marker still fires (measured 1–10 main-side commits touching regen-routed artifacts per PR window). So the card's "the cost is regeneration, not conflict" is half right: both costs are real, and (a) removes the risky half only.

Implementation cost to budget: scripts/check-adr-0087-registration.mjs's LEDGER_SOURCES reads registry.ts textually (with the #4690 source-parser-vs-projection proof) and would need to read a directory. That file is scripts/**, i.e. in the domain:spec-tooling lane.

Suggested sequencing: land scripts/adr-anchors.json first as the in-lane pilot (proven clean above, no generated-artifact ordering coupled to it), then the registries in a dedicated domain:spec window when the retirement queue is briefly empty — never mid-window, which is the collision this card is about.

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[os-help]

Escalating to needs-user-decision — the measurement this card was dispatched for is complete, and it falsified the card's own central sub-claim, which flips the option ranking. Dev returned needs_decision with numbers and no PR: the success outcome for a measurement card, not a shortfall.

Full measurement is in the comment above. PM verification of its three load-bearing claims, done independently on origin/main rather than taken from the report:

Claim	My check
Both tables are consumed as sets, so a dropped entry is silent	✅ registeredRetiredKeys() (build-schemas.ts:699) builds a Map from RETIRED_KEYS_BY_MAJOR; a missing entry is simply absent — there is nothing for a gate to go red on
registry.ts is genuinely hot	✅ 37 of 691 commits in the window touch it (dev measured 38/697 — the small delta is window boundary, materially the same ~5.4%)
The conflicts are real, not absorbed by the regen driver	✅ neither registry.ts nor scripts/adr-anchors.json is routed to merge=os-regen — confirmed live against .gitattributes

What changed about this card

The body says the git-level conflict is "often absent… so this is not primarily a conflict-resolution problem." Measured over laps where both sides appended: registry.ts conflicted in 6 of 11 (55%), adr-anchors.json in 1 of 2 — 613 lines of hand-resolved conflict markers in 4 days. On #6866 itself, laps 1 and 2 conflicted and only lap 3 merged clean: the card generalised from the last lap it happened to watch.

That inverts the severity. The cost is not mainly wall-clock — it is that every one of those 6 resolutions was a chance to silently drop a sibling's retirement, on tables where a dropped entry produces no error anywhere.

Three-axis analysis

1. Real business need — measured, not asserted. 6 hand conflicts / 613 lines / 4 days, on set-consumed tables, while ADR-0049 enforce-or-remove keeps producing these cards by design. The failure mode is not "a card takes longer"; it is "a retirement quietly stops being registered and every gate stays green". That is the same class as the phantom-baseline defect this lane fixed today in #7122 — a wrong projection that is perfectly self-consistent.

2. Long-term soundness. Option (a) is the structural answer this repo has already reached twice: .changeset/*.md for its other hottest file, and merge=os-regen for the generated half. These two hand-authored append registries are the last append-only ledgers without it. Option (c) is a coordination workaround the PM must re-apply every window — it does not accumulate.

3. Makes AI authoring errors structurally harder. Conflict-free by construction beats "resolve carefully", and this is precisely the case where careful is not detectable: the resolution that drops a row looks exactly like the one that keeps it. Removing the hand-merge removes the class.

The three options, re-ranked by the measurement

• (a) Split the append surface into per-entry files with a concatenating generator. Counterfactual replay of the six real conflicts: 6/6 CLEAN, plus the adr-anchors conflict clean. The harness was verified non-blind before that number was believed — byte-identical round-trip confirmed, and a control edit to the same entry still conflicts (rc=1). Cost, stated honestly: a one-time reorder of spec-changes.json and docs/protocol-upgrade-guide.md (46/46 entries move under filename-sorted concatenation), ~6 positional prose cross-references rewritten to id-based, and teaching check-adr-0087-registration.mjs's LEDGER_SOURCES to read a directory.
• (b) Stop committing the generated artifacts — largely already answered by merge=os-regen (spec 生成物没有 merge driver:两个 PR 各改几行,语义上是集合运算,却每次都打成文本冲突 #4675), which defers and regenerates from the merged tree while keeping the diffs reviewable. Going further would spend review visibility the repo deliberately kept, and would not touch the two files where 100% of the measured conflicts actually land.
• (c) Accept, document, batch — both batched PRs (feat(spec)!: close ApiEndpointSchema against undeclared keys, and name the author state on the upgrade path (#5384, #5227) #6840, refactor(spec)!: retire ActionDescriptor.isAsync (#6748) and correct supportsPause's TSDoc (#6749) #6862) landed with 0 laps despite 44 and 27 commits of drift. But n=2 cannot separate batching from landing speed, and it reduces how often a contended lap happens without changing what one costs.

Recommendation: (a), scoped to the two hand-authored registries only, with (c) as the interim mitigation and (b) treated as already answered.

⚠️ Honest limit, stated up front: (a) removes the conflict resolution, not the regeneration lap — the lap still fires from the merge queue and the os-regen pending marker. So the card's "the cost is regeneration, not conflict" is half right, and (a) removes only the risky half. If the appetite question is "will this make retirement cards fast", the answer is no; if it is "will this stop a retirement being silently dropped", the answer is yes.

Decided by this seat (veto window, not a permission gate)

• Concatenation order = sort by entry id, not an explicit index file. The index variant is self-defeating: the index is itself a single append-only file every card must edit, reintroducing the exact conflict being removed.
• Sequencing: scripts/adr-anchors.json lands first as the pilot — it is this seat's own file, so the pattern gets proven without touching anyone else's. packages/spec/src/migrations/registry.ts is scheduled with the domain:spec seat in a window when their retirement queue is briefly empty — ⛔ never mid-window, which is the collision this card is about.
• The routing question in my claim comment is now answered by measurement, for [PM seat] triage (objectstack-wide) — 🟢 os-litant · session_017VGfRocA8VjczSe84fgjY3 · R+177 · (坐席 2026-09-10T12:45Z 维护者召唤;前任 R+165 已留简报,径直坐席) #6015: the generator half is genuinely domain:spec-tooling; the registry half is not. If (a) is taken, this card should split along that line rather than move wholesale.

Dropping from the active queue. No work proceeds on the registry half until this is ruled.

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[os-zhuang]

Maintainer ruling (2026-08-10, directed in session session_01BPWqbmEFU8dJepBJTHESXd): hybrid — batch now, split the append surface as the durable fix.

Now: the PM landing relay batches same-window retirement cards into one PR — this shift already measured it as the cheapest mitigation (#6748+#6749, #5384+#5227). Queued: implement per-card registry entry files concatenated by a generator, the .changeset/*.md shape that already de-conflicted this repo's other hottest file; scripts/adr-anchors.json is in the same fix space and may ride the same mechanism. Option B (uncommitted build-time artifacts) is rejected — the review diff of spec-changes.json / the upgrade guide is worth the laps it costs.

needs-user-decision → pm:queue.

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