publication requires a reader; recording-decisions allows compaction

Both from gap files loom-cli filed as the first real adopter of externals.

publication.md: "publishing is not an act you can complete alone" existed only in
a sibling document as an aside about a tool. It is a property of the act and now
says so, along with the fact that publication has a visibility — which externals'
confidentiality rule depends on entirely and this document never mentioned.

recording-decisions.md: "never revised" and "must be readable" conflict far enough
out. Adopts loom-cli's rule verbatim in substance — drop what the artifact could
recover, never drop a decline, a measurement, a belief shown wrong, or a
supersession — because compaction is safe in exactly the cases where the entry was
redundant and unsafe in exactly the cases the log exists for.

Entries 79-81. annotating's gaps are left standing on purpose; it is the most
depended-on document and its revision is Jeff's call.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>

.loom/event-log.md

@@ -3613,3 +3613,66 @@ fetchable is.***
 *And the command we nearly cut for being a third kind of thing — `reachable` —
 found all three on the day it would have shipped. **That is its validation and not
 a feature request.***
+
+---
+
+## 79 — publication says that a publication nobody can fetch is not one
+
+**Decided.** `publication.md` gains *"publishing is not an act you can complete
+alone"* as a property of the act, and says that publication has a visibility and
+that naming the readers is part of publishing.
+
+**Advances:** a repository can tell whether it has actually published.
+
+**Filed by** `loom-cli` in `publication.gaps.md`, from one round of real use. Their
+claim: the sentence we needed already existed, but **in a sibling document, as an
+aside about a tool**, rather than as a property of publication — and
+`publication.md` never mentioned visibility although `externals`' confidentiality
+rule depends on it entirely.
+
+**The belief that could turn out false:** that "the test is a fetch you did not
+perform" is checkable often enough to be a practice and not just a slogan. *It was
+measured three times in one afternoon and failed all three, which is evidence it
+is worth stating and no evidence at all that anybody will do it.*
+
+## 80 — compaction is allowed, and four kinds of entry are exempt
+
+**Decided.** `recording-decisions.md` gains a compaction rule: an entry may be
+dropped when a competent reader could recover it from the artifact, and may never
+be dropped when it records a decline, a measurement, a belief shown wrong, or a
+supersession. A compaction gets an entry.
+
+**Advances:** the log stays readable without losing the part that has no other
+home.
+
+**Filed by** `loom-cli` in `recording-decisions.gaps.md` — that *"never revised"*
+and *"somebody must be able to read it"* both hold and eventually conflict. **The
+rule adopted here is theirs, including its formulation:** *compaction is safe in
+exactly the cases where the entry was redundant with the artifact, and unsafe in
+exactly the cases the log exists for.*
+
+**The belief that could turn out false:** that "recoverable from the artifact" is
+a judgement two people make the same way. *If it is not, compaction becomes a
+quiet way to lose entry 69.*
+
+## 81 — the four gap files are answered, and one was answered by repair
+
+**Decided.** Of the four gap files `loom-cli` filed against the four
+conventions — the first genuine use of `externals` on a real dependency — three
+are answered: entries 79 and 80 here, and `cart/v2`.
+
+**`annotating` is left standing**, deliberately. *Its gaps are real* — the source
+hash that detects a violated freeze, **dissolve** as the definition of responding,
+and what to do when a frozen file must change — *but `annotating` is the
+most-depended-on document we have and the one whose revision costs every adopter
+an afternoon.* **Jeff's call, not mine.**
+
+**The measurement worth keeping:** *the adopter found four defects in four
+documents in three rounds, and the sharpest one was in the version I had written
+that same day.* **`cart/v1` made the cart untracked and did not notice that this
+turns conversion from lossy-in-the-tree into lossy-absolutely.**
+
+**Which is the case for `externals` as a whole**, stated better by the thing than
+by the document: *the gap file is the only mechanism here where somebody who
+cannot edit your document can still put a defect in front of you, and it caught
+what review by the author did not.*

.loom/published/publication.md

@@ -15,6 +15,28 @@ should be unmissable.*
 **`ls .loom/published/` is *what have we committed to?*** — and it is the question
 to ask before changing anything.
 
+## Publishing is not an act you can complete alone
+
+**A file in `.loom/published/` that its intended readers cannot fetch is not
+published.** *The move is the act, but the act is not finished until somebody who
+is not you can perform the read.*
+
+> **The failure is invisible from the inside.** *Every check available to the
+> publisher passes — the file is there, the commit landed, the path is right.*
+> **Only a reader can detect it, and a reader who cannot fetch it does not know
+> the document exists to ask about.**
+
+*The commonest form is a document that answers "why can you not see this?" and is
+published **inside** the thing that cannot be seen.*
+
+**So publication has a visibility, and it is a property of the act rather than of
+the file.** *"Others" is not "everyone".* **Naming who the readers are is part of
+publishing**, because a repository that depends on this one has to know whether it
+is inside that set — *and because a reader who copies a document out inherits the
+copy without inheriting the visibility it was published under.*
+
+**The test is a fetch you did not perform.**
+
 ## What is published is a document
 
 **Prose, in whatever form its readers need.** *If a repository organises its

.loom/published/recording-decisions.md

@@ -24,6 +24,29 @@ reads.*
 you already rejected — because the rejection lived somewhere that did not
 survive.*
 
+## Compaction, and the entries it may never touch
+
+**"Never revised" and "somebody must be able to read it" both hold, and far
+enough out they conflict** — *a log nobody can get through has stopped being a
+record.*
+
+**Compaction is allowed. Dropping an entry is not the same as revising one**, and
+the uncompacted log is in git history, which is where a reader who needs it goes.
+
+> **An entry may be dropped when a competent reader could recover it by reading
+> the artifact.**
+>
+> **An entry may never be dropped when it records a decline, a measurement, a
+> belief that was shown wrong, or one entry superseding another.**
+
+*Which means **compaction is safe in exactly the cases where the entry was
+redundant with the artifact, and unsafe in exactly the cases the log exists
+for.*** **The four protected kinds are the ones with no other home:** *the code
+shows what was built and can never show what was refused, what was measured, what
+turned out false, or that somebody changed their mind.*
+
+**A compaction is itself a decision, and gets an entry.**
+
 ## Where it lives
 
 `.loom/event-log.md`. **A stream, so a file.**