# Recording decisions

**An entry says what was decided, what it is believed to advance, and the belief
that could turn out false.**

> **Only a stated belief can later be shown wrong.** *"To satisfy §4" is a
> citation, not a reason — it points at a label.* **A constraint whose reason
> cannot be found gets re-litigated as a defect by whoever inherits it.**

**Appended, newest last, never revised.** *A later entry supersedes an earlier
one by saying so.* **A revised record cannot show that anybody changed their
mind, which is most of what a reader wants from it.**

**No status, no assignee, nothing to process.** *The moment an entry can be "not
yet applied", somebody must track which ones are — and the record becomes a work
tracker, which is how a thing that outlives its authors turns into a queue nobody
reads.*

## Declines belong here too

**What you considered and did not do, with the reason you did not.**

*Almost nobody writes these, and three weeks later somebody proposes the thing
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.**