marketplace/cli/internal/issue/AGENTS.md

AGENTS.md — internal/issue (DOMAIN)

What an issue IS. The canonical markdown format, the label taxonomy, validation, checkboxes, the dependency graph, the store, and eviction.

It knows nothing about any tracker: no Gitea, no logins, no HTTP, no issue numbers. Delete the transport entirely and this layer keeps working — issues that live only on this machine are first-class, not drafts on their way somewhere.

Imports project and the standard library, and nothing else; two tests hold that, see internal/AGENTS.md.

file	what is in it
issue.go	the Issue type, FromText/Text, Slugify, IsSlug, UniqueID, DomainKeys — and the package comment with the annotated file format
meta.go	ParseMeta/RenderMeta: the metadata block, one field per line
taxonomy.go	Types, Severities, the section headers, RequiredSections, ExpectedSections, CanonicalLabels, SectionBody
template.go	Template: the prefilled body per type
validate.go	Validate: errors mean malformed, warnings mean it deviates from its template
checkbox.go	Checkboxes, SetCheckbox, CheckboxProgress — pure functions over a string
graph.go	Graph, Dependents, TopoOrder, FindCycles over depends:
depsection.go	BodyDepRefs: references written in ## Depends on / ## Issues prose
store.go	Root, AllIDs, SlugFiles, Load/LoadAll/Save, RequireStore, CreateStore, StoreError
index.go	BuildIndex: INDEX.md, a view of the directory
evict.go	Classify, Evict, Remove, and the report types
layering_test.go	the two tests that keep a tracker out of this package

Identity

A slug derived from the title, and the file name is the id:

.kettle/issues/wire-sqlc-appclick.md

---
id: wire-sqlc-appclick
state: open
labels: [type/task, tech/sql]
assignees: [naudachu]
milestone: v0.2
depends: [migrate-schema]
origin: gitea
gitea: owner/repo#42
synced: 2026-08-07T18:40:00Z
---
# Wire sqlc into the appclick repo layer

## Summary
…

Keys down to origin are owned here. Everything below is foreign: written by the sync layer, carried through load and save verbatim in Issue.Extra, never read. That passthrough is what lets one file represent both a local issue and a synced one without the domain learning a second vocabulary.

Every metadata field is one line and lists are inline, so plain grep works without a parser:

grep -l  'labels:.*type/bug'          .kettle/issues/*.md
grep -ln 'depends:.*migrate-schema'   .kettle/issues/*.md   # who depends on it

FromText takes an id that overrides the one in the block, which is how the store makes the file name authoritative.

Origin is the safety argument

origin: local means this file IS the issue — there is no other copy, and deleting it deletes the work. It is a complete state, not a pending one. Anything with a tracker origin can be fetched again, which is what makes it safe to remove.

Every dangerous operation in this package turns on that one field:

• Classify splits the store into evictable, protected and still-open. It is pure — it reads loaded issues and decides, touching no disk — and a protected issue comes back as protected even when it was named explicitly: naming a file does not make deleting it safe.
• Evict classifies, removes, and rebuilds the index. One implementation, called both by the offline command and by the sync layer — which does nothing to this decision except hand over issues whose state: it has just refreshed.
• Remove is deliberately dumb: it takes an id, not a decision. Whether an issue may go is settled by Classify before this is reached, so the dangerous half of the operation has no branches in it at all.

The store is a working set, not an archive: a closed issue with a tracker origin is evicted, and eviction is not a one-off migration — a pull by number fetches an issue in any state, so a closed issue pulled after an eviction lands on disk again.

The store, and the three ways it can be missing

AllIDs reads <slug>.md and nothing else. A slug has no dot in it, so wire-sqlc.comments.md is not an issue; without that rule a bare push tries to file a comment thread as a unit of work. SlugFiles is the same rule read the other way round — everything named <id>.<something> belongs to that issue and goes when it goes, which is how the domain removes an issue completely without learning what a comment thread is.

Three failures, three messages, because they are three different things to do next:

answer	means
project.NotFoundError	no project at all — run kettle init
store … does not exist	a project whose store was never created
store … exists but is empty	a store with nothing filed in it yet

ErrStoreMissing marks the first two. Conflating "empty" with "not there" is exactly what once made a missed directory look like an empty backlog. Nothing creates a store as a side effect of a write — only new and pull call CreateStore, and both announce it.

Sections, and what a checkbox is

Section headers are fixed English literals in a fixed order; only body prose is Russian. RequiredSections (## Summary, ## Spec) must be present in every type; ExpectedSections are the per-type ones and their absence is a warning.

DepSections — ## Depends on and ## Issues — both name what an issue depends on, so both are edge sources pointing the same way. In a type/feature that reads container → child: "the container is closed when its children are closed" is a dependency, while "a child belongs to a feature" is membership, and membership has no place in a dependency graph. Which is why a child never names its container back.

depends: is the authoritative edge list; body prose is never walked by Graph. BodyDepRefs exists so a command can report what the prose claims, and never so the graph can be built from it.

A checkbox is the one part of a body that is state and not prose. SetCheckbox is surgical: exactly one byte of the input changes, and everything else — trailing whitespace, the item's own wording, an existing [X]'s capital — comes back byte for byte. Ticking a box must not produce a diff wider than the state that changed. Fenced code blocks are skipped whole: - [ ] inside a fence is an example of the markup, not a box anybody may tick.

CheckboxProgress is computed on the fly. Progress is not a metadata field — a second copy of that state would be wrong by the next edit.

Usage

root := issue.Root(out)                 // out overrides; "" resolves the project
if err := issue.RequireStore(root); err != nil { return err }

issues, err := issue.LoadAll(root)
order := issue.TopoOrder(ids, issue.Graph(issues))   // dependencies first
errs, warns := issue.Validate(issues[id], knownIDs)

TopoOrder breaks cycles deterministically rather than raising: a cycle is a data problem for the caller to report (FindCycles finds them), not a reason to refuse to order the rest.

What does not belong here

An issue number, a login, an HTTP call, a label colour, a hex code, a JSON tag, a yaml tag. If one appears in this package it is in the wrong place — colours are mapping's, because a hex code is how a tracker paints a chip and not what an issue is.

Keeping this file true

• Scope: every .go file in this directory — the format, the taxonomy, the store, the graph, checkboxes, eviction.
• Update it when a metadata field is added to DomainKeys, a type or severity is added to the taxonomy, a required or expected section changes, a file appears or goes in the table above, or any rule about what may be deleted changes. The format's operator-facing statement of intent lives in the plugin (plugins/kettle/skills/issue/references/format.md) — when the taxonomy moves, both change.
• Do not document how any of this reaches a tracker.