# Publication

**What a repository has handed over for others to depend on lives in
`.loom/published/`.**

> **Publishing is a change of kind, not a change of status.** *An unpublished
> document is an implementation detail you may rename at will. **A published one
> is a contract.***

**So publication is an act somebody performs** — a file moves in — **and the move
is a diff that shows up in review.** *A flag in frontmatter is a line nobody
notices; this is the moment a thing becomes somebody else's problem, and it
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
thinking some other way internally, that is its own business:* **a consumer
cannot tell whether it did, and must not need to.**

> **What is not exported is not hidden.** *The rest of the repository is there to
> read. It is simply not what you depend on.*

## There is no directory for what is unpublished

**Everything else is simply elsewhere in the repository.** *Naming the complement
invents a category — and a directory called `internal/` would look like a
security boundary and not be one.*