ADR 021 Event Time History - joeroberts/release-radar GitHub Wiki

  • ID: ADR-021
  • Status: Accepted
  • Date: 2026-09-10
  • Date meaning: Original dated decision/source section; extraction recorded 2026-10-02.
  • Implementation: No implementation information was recorded in the source status; tickets own progress.
  • Approval qualification: Authorized Phase 6 local outcome; source completion and architecture authorization do not imply full owner manual acceptance or deployment authority.

Context

Historical presentation must use captured event-time facts and preserve unknown legacy values rather than reconstructing history from current state.

Decision

New local audit rows capture immutable event-time facts in the same app-owned transaction as the delivery mutation: exact project and registration identity, available ticket/phase identity and name, lane or transition values, request generation and ticket outcome. A transaction failure rolls back both the delivery change and its historical facts. Existing audit rows are not backfilled from current state; absent facts remain unknown. Occurrence, observation and database recording times are separate fields where the source supplies them.

History projects local audits, retained/imported history, latest persisted observations, notification delivery, review and completion records through stable source identities. Projection and browsing are read-only and project scoped. Observation snapshots do not become a fabricated change log, asserted actor/thread labels do not become verified independent provenance, and notification outcomes do not imply acceptance. Duplicate source identities and exact command replay retain their existing deduplication authority.

Removal retains the historical source identity and captured facts while removing operational access. Re-adding a project creates a new registration and cannot make old history actionable. Full application backup/recovery preserves the additive records and legacy unknowns; it does not replay decisions, notifications or audit events. Opening a historical entity requires its exact retained identity. Missing or legacy identities fail to an explicit recovery state rather than selecting a current replacement.

This decision establishes the local History contract only. It does not change portable archive v1, implement a Phase 7 package, create a generic event bus, grant observer mutation authority, or make repository documents, copied SQLite files or external services delivery authorities. Any future portable format that claims complete history must represent the supported event facts and provenance or reject the export explicitly.