luria

Concept: External knowledge and remotes

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Not every identity a record depends on is locally owned.

Luria remotes let foreign identities participate in the local reference model without pretending the local repository is their authority.

Another Luria record

A remote prefix can identify a foreign record whose schemes are cited from this one.

Conceptually:

local claim
   ↓
LU-ADR-013
   ↓
foreign record

The composed code preserves ownership.

Arbitrary identifier namespaces

A remote can also describe a non-Luria namespace: a uid pattern says what one of its identifiers looks like, and a url template says where it lives (ADR-024).

Examples:

  • arXiv IDs,
  • issue keys,
  • standards identifiers,
  • DOI-like identifiers.

The record can then treat those references structurally rather than as handwritten URLs.

Hermeticity

Remote checking has a different failure surface from local checking: the network may be down, and upstream may change underneath a record that did not.

A remote can declare how to ask what one of its identifiers is — the title upstream gives a paper, say — so a citation whose identifier names a different document than the one filed can be reported (ADR-080). What upstream answered is recorded in a committed lockfile, so a check can be answered from the record instead of the network. A project chooses how far the lint may reach: from “never, answer from the record alone” to “always, and fail if you cannot”.

The lint asks; it does not record. The answers are written in one place, where merges serialize, so concurrent branches do not collide on one shared file and a branch’s result does not depend on one contributor’s network (ADR-112).

Pinning

Some external dependencies need a stronger statement than:

this identifier still resolves.

A pin says:

the external content I depended on had this content identity.

A pin keeps two facts apart: the content the record endorsed, and the content upstream was last seen serving. Drift is the difference between them, compared offline from what the record has committed rather than by fetching during the lint (ADR-066). Re-endorsing after review is the acknowledgement. The commands are in Reference remote knowledge.

That extends truth maintenance across repository boundaries:

local claim
    ↓ depends on
external content
    ↓ changes
local review needed

Authority remains external

A remote reference is not imported ownership.

The local record can cite, check, and pin what it depends on while preserving the fact that the source of authority lives elsewhere.

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