Approval Step — history

The dated record of how Approval Step got here, moved out of the spec on 2026-10-19 because a reader does not need it to use the spec today. The spec keeps every section spec-format.md requires and its Deleted: tombstones; everything smaller is in git log -- atoms/approval-step.md.

Decisions

Entries that record a migration or a repair rather than a turn the pattern took.

• 2026-09-12 — Rewritten in GRACE lang v0.40; nothing but language changed. Chose: the five actions as a signature block, Invariant 1 through 10 keeping their numbers, every success effect conditioned on a declared admitted submit, admitted resolve or admitted read (Hard invariant 16), the six-step rejection precedence — repeated verbatim in four places in the prose, once per resolving action and once in the state table — collapsed to one seven-row case space with the ordering carried by ONLY IF guards, the three resolving actions unified under declared resolving action, deciding reference and decision instant terms so [Approve], [Reject] and [Withdraw] state their shared guards once instead of three times, the six acceptance areas opened into Check 1.1 through 6.3 with four External checks, the Non-goals-and-edge-cases prose split into a Non-goal 1 through 20 family and five edge-case families (String, Clock semantics, Concurrency, Atomic writes, Indeterminate outcome). Over: the prose spec. Because: the migration plan; cites.py --into approval-step found nothing citing this atom by label. 81.1 KB → 62.7 KB.

• 2026-09-12 — Three propositions had two owners each. Chose: Invariant 2.1 owns membership exclusivity and the State family no longer restates it; Operation 8 owns an admitted submit stands the step in pending; Identity 12 owns the atom does not confirm a subject reference. Over: keeping each pair. Because: Authority 3, and all three were found by W-duplicate-proposition rather than by reading — the same pattern as State Machine, where the duplicates a 169-rule surface hides are exactly the ones no reader finds.

• 2026-09-12 — A cross-spec citation was written in the local form. Chose: Selective Disclosure Invariant 5.1, the qualified form Hard invariant 28 declares. Over: [Selective Disclosure](/atoms/selective-disclosure.html) states as its \Invariant 5``, which reads as a citation of this spec’s Invariant 5 — submitter exclusivity, an unrelated rule. Because: the citation-aim audit resolved it against the local registry and the aim was wrong. Nothing enforces the qualified form, and a census over the corpus returns 24 candidates of which nearly all are local citations that merely sit near a spec link — so the class is docketed rather than instrumented.

Migration notes

• 2026-09-15 — Capability requirement 1, moved from Operation. What the deployment supplies, which is what the family means. The rule stood under Operation — one action’s rules — while naming no action, because this spec was migrated before the standard family had a home in an atom; the five atoms migrated a day later put the same obligation here. The words are the words the rule carried (council read 76).