Three of the roadmap's claims were contradicted by the repository
itself.
Fleet management was Phase 11, "Planned", and positioning.md said config
still flowed to the agent from the host rather than from the platform.
agent-management-design.md has recorded the opposite for some time:
punch list complete, verified live, with central authoring, versioning,
rollout on the next check-in, observation, and a restart command a real
agent picks up and acts on. There is no Phase 11 now. Its remainder is
either already named there -- stop/uninstall, per-host multi-row
alerting, a rule-per-host generator -- or belongs to Phase 8, since
distributing rules is the one genuinely new thing the mechanism has to
carry, and a rule language nobody can push to a fleet is not worth
having.
That inverts the old ordering argument, which put fleet last on the
grounds that it manages configuration the earlier phases define. Sound
reasoning; the world went the other way and built the mechanism first.
Recorded rather than quietly dropped, because the instinct behind it is
a good one that happened not to apply.
Retention was listed as a question Phase 10 would finally have to
answer. Half of it is answered: api/logretention serves operator-driven
preview and delete with an owner-only per-agent floor. What is missing
is an automatic TTL, so Phase 10 owns tiering and automatic TTL rather
than retention from nothing.
The rule-language recommendation is now settled rather than proposed,
and not on its own authority: DesiredOverride is already a closed typed
shape that cannot carry arbitrary code, so no channel exists that would
deliver JavaScript to an agent even if the language argument had gone
the other way.
That surfaced a requirement nothing had written down. Agent management
rests on an invariant it states outright -- every editable field
degrades behaviour without cutting off the agent's ability to receive
the next correction. Processing rules break it: a rule that panics or
loops strands the agent exactly the way a corrupted ingest endpoint
would, across every host it reached first. Phase 8 now owes either total
evaluation or apply-then-verify with rollback, chosen deliberately
rather than discovered mid-rollout.
Signed-off-by: John Coffey <[email protected]>
jcoffey-dev
18a55ccd5a