luria

Concept: Sources and projections

3 min read

Graph View

A maintained record needs a clear direction of authority.

Source

The source is where knowledge is authored.

Examples:

record/decisions.d/ADR-019.md
record/literature.d/LIT-042.md
record/devlog.d/...

Projection

A projection is derived from source knowledge.

Examples:

  • indexes,
  • concatenated documents,
  • chain pages,
  • status reports,
  • published sites,
  • SQLite exports.

The governing direction is:

source
  ↓
projection

not:

source ↔ projection

Why this matters

A hand-maintained copy can become wrong without producing any signal.

DP-3 states Luria’s general rule: a projection of an authoritative source should be derived whenever possible.

That is why projections are rebuilt by commands rather than edited:

$ luria index      # scheme indexes and value pages, journal books, chain pages,
                   # status reports, the record and configuration pages
$ luria collect    # fragments into their shared file, such as CHANGELOG.md
$ luria site       # the record staged as a site
$ luria export     # the record as a SQLite file

luria index covers the committed views; the other three are separate commands with separate outputs. None of them treats its output as a separately authored document. See the CLI reference.

Generated views and concurrency

DP-2 adds another dimension: when a shared artifact must be generated, the writer belongs where merges serialize, not on every branch.

This prevents “generated but still conflicted” artifacts from becoming a hidden shared-file lock.

Chain pages

A chain page is a projection of local relation edges.

It intentionally renders history, including inactive or superseded steps. The page itself is not where lineage is authored.

Sites

luria site stages the record for publication as a Quartz vault, under rules that keep it a projection (ADR-042):

  • paths are preserved, so every relative link the fixer wrote keeps resolving and no second link resolver is needed;
  • a source that renders into a view is withheld and the view is published — a journal entry appears in its book, a fragment in its collected file;
  • a link that leaves the published set goes to the repository rather than being emitted dead;
  • frontmatter is surfaced: each document’s status and edges are rendered onto its page, so a superseded decision does not read as current on the web.

Exports

luria export writes a SQLite file — documents, field values, typed edges, citations and journal entries — that makes the record convenient to query analytically (ADR-116).

The database is still a projection: rebuilt from scratch on every run through the same readers the lint uses, never written back to, and not committed.

The authoritative facts remain in the repository-native source record.

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