Compensable Workflow — history

The dated record of how Compensable Workflow got here, moved out of the spec on 2026-10-21 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 -- compositions/compensable-workflow.md.

Decisions

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

• 2026-09-23 — Rewritten in GRACE lang v0.61; nothing but language changed except one tombstone and eight repairs the rewrite could not restate. Chose: Composes, Composition state with Replay beneath it, Capability requirement, Primitive policy, Action wiring, Wiring decision and Event schemas as the surfaces, in Undo History’s and Idempotent Reservation’s shapes; invariant numbers 1 through 8 unchanged and Invariant 9 tombstoned; a Generation acceptance section with seventeen Check and seven External check rules, each naming the rule it tests; Non-goals and Edge cases split, with Concurrency and Indeterminate outcome under the second; Compensation Ref renamed Compensation Reference, and Start Workflow renamed Start Compensable Workflow, the name its wire always carried. The repairs: the compensable workflow record loses the outcome field it declared set once at start and immutable while setting it at the terminal and writing it at no step — the replay reads it from the terminal marker (Composition state 5, Replay 5 and 6); a commit event is appended when no next step remains (Action wiring 31), where the prose named the terminal marker and no step that wrote it; the continue policy ends through standing failures (Action wiring 32, 40 and 41), where move on re-picked a failed step on every [Advance], since a compensation failure leaves the step completed; a marker whose append fails with an effect standing unrecorded answers effect-landed (Action wiring 55), where the prose positioned it nowhere; [Cancel] past a pivot answers roll-forward (Action wiring 73), where the prose promised its roll-forward disposition and declared none; [Cancel] writes only in the forward phase (Action wiring 74 through 76), where a compensation onset event appended in the compensating phase would have fired a transition the spine refuses and answered spine-fault to an ordinary call; [Advance] fires an owed transition before answering already-terminal (Action wiring 81), where the prose answered first and left a terminal marker’s owed fire to a [Cancel] nobody sends; and two citations re-aimed — the obligation-realization boundary lives in working-ideas/outbound-contract-ports.md, not in execution-contract.md, and Undo History states the boundary the Intent quoted as Undo History Non-goal 10, the sentence quoted being gone. Over: the prose spec, and a first migration that restated those eight as it found them. Because: the migration plan, and the standing rule that a finding is fixed in the pass that finds it. Invariant 9, constituent invariants preserved, is the class council read 53 ruled — Execution Contract Conformance 8 settles it by reference and Composes 10 cites it — at the class’s fourth seam, Idempotent Reservation’s being the third. Richardson’s title in Standards references is Microservices saga again: the saga rename reached a cited title, and a citation keeps the author’s word. formal: and the open model line are unchanged — the model was stale for reasons that predate this rewrite, and the rewrite touches no .tla.

• 2026-09-23 — Progress for where a compensable workflow has got, position for where a write lands. Chose: the phase, current step and outcome renamed progress, the read action Position renamed [Read Progress] with the wire read_progress, and Invariant 2 titled Progress equivalence, numbers unchanged. Over: keeping position in both senses. Because: the page used position for two things — the storage-failure positions, which is the sense four other specifications declare, and the phase-step-outcome triple no other page means by it — and a name carries one meaning (council read 166’s ruling: this page renames, the corpus keeps position). Progress is the page’s own word for the thing (forward progress), and a read action takes the corpus’s Read form beside [Read Log]; the answer arm is the declared term itself. The TLA+ header’s comment still says position equivalence; the model is stale for older reasons and untouched here.