0005 — Draft lifecycle rules with importers; never write the registry

Status: accepted

Decision

Lifecycle rules can be drafted by importers: small modules that read one authoritative, machine-readable source and return draft rules in the v2 format. Importers live in tools/importers/ and implement one interface (Importer in tools/importers/types.ts): an id, the ecosystem they feed, the sources they read, and import(context).

• Importers never write the registry. They return drafts; a maintainer reviews them and changes registry/ through a pull request. Review is required before any imported fact reaches a rule.
• The runner owns provenance. Importers return rules without a provenance field. The runner stamps each draft with the run date as observedAt and reviewedAt, the importer’s id as importer, and the reviewer pending-review. An importer cannot present its output as reviewed, and a test fails if pending-review ever appears in a bundled registry.
• All input goes through the context. An importer fetches only with context.fetchText and reads the time only from context.now. That lets tests replay recordings (no network in tests or in npm run check) and keeps output deterministic: drafts are sorted by id and key order is canonical.
• Importers run only in maintainer tooling and scheduled CI. Scans never use importers, never use the network, and never read drafts.
• Drafts are validated like any registry. The runner checks them as a v2 registry for the importer’s ecosystem and fails with every problem listed.
• Evidence policy is unchanged. Every draft names an authoritative source; an importer that cannot establish a fact records a note and skips it instead of guessing.

Why

The registry has 15 hand-written rules and will not reach hundreds that way. Authoritative sources such as release schedules and registry metadata already publish most lifecycle facts in machine-readable form. Drafting from them removes transcription errors and keeps every rule traceable, while keeping a human between the source and the data users rely on.

Consequences

• A new importer is one module plus a recorded response, and shows up in run --list once it is added to tools/importers/index.ts.
• Draft severity and migration guidance are a starting point; reviewers adjust them.
• Scheduling importers to open data pull requests is a separate decision (it needs the diff and pull-request-body tools first).