Glossary

Catalog. The machine-readable ledger of every repository: purpose, ring, layers, wave, contents. It lives in the catalog repository and is the source of truth for GitHub descriptions, topics, custom properties, the organization README and this handbook.

Ring. A repository’s dependency tier: spine, platform, system, domain or standards. Dependencies point inward only. Each ring has a colour in the identity.

Layer. A rung of the stack, L0 (silicon) to L18 (content). A repository serves one or more layers; all means the whole ledger.

Wave. The roadmap phase in which a repository’s first crate becomes buildable, 1 to 5.

Readiness. How far a repository’s flagship component has come: shipped, partial, seed or none.

Tier. The review tier of a repository: incubating, stable, core or archived.

Release train. A coordinated release of the whole suite, named by year and number, for example 2027.1. The suite repository’s lockfile pins it.

Spec-first cleanroom. Implementing from a specification and its conformance suite rather than from another implementation, with provenance recorded.

RFC. A design proposal that crosses repositories or changes an interface; lives in the rfcs repository with a decision log.

DCO. Developer Certificate of Origin; the Signed-off-by line every commit carries.

WIT. The WebAssembly Interface Types language, used in interfaces to define every cross-repository API as public:<area>/<interface>@x.y.z packages.

pub. The organization’s command-line tool: scaffolds repositories, checks conventions, syncs the catalog to GitHub, pulls and builds the suite.