# What `settled` is

**`settled` is private. This page is not, and it is here rather than there** —
*because a page explaining a private repository, published inside that private
repository, is not published.* **That was the first fix and it did not work; this
is the second.**

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## Why a decision about `externals` is not in `externals`

**Most of them are.** *`externals` has its own log, and how a consumer reconciles
is recorded there.*

**What lives here is the shape of the whole:** *that there is a `bedrock` at all;
which repositories exist and why; that affordances, stagings, roles and beads are
bracketed and what that defers; that a registry is a fan-out reader rather than a
service.* **None of those belong to any one repository, and putting them in one
would make that repository quietly authoritative over its siblings.**

> **An entry goes in the log of the repository whose decision it is.** *This is
> the repository for decisions that are nobody's in particular.*

## It is not a new kind

**One file: an `event-log`.** *The kind is exactly the one `bedrock` describes.*
**What is different is ownership, not shape** — *and if this ever holds something
that is not an event log, it has become a new kind and should say so here.*

## Why it is private

**A record of how a thing came to be shaped is mostly a record of being wrong in
public.** *Roughly a third of its entries correct earlier ones.* **That is the log
working**, and it is also not something to hand a stranger as an introduction.

*The consequence, stated because it is a real cost: **the justification for a
constraint may be unreadable by the person the constraint lands on.** If that
starts to bite, this page is the wrong fix and opening the log is the right one.*

## If you are stuck

**You do not want the entries. You want the one sentence you could not guess**,
which is at the top of this page.

**And the entries are not the way in.** *[`loom/.loom`](https://git.hypertheory-labs.dev/loom/.loom)
routes by question; [`bedrock`](https://git.hypertheory-labs.dev/loom/bedrock)
holds the primitives and a starting page.*