Designs

Design documents for changes that are in flight or recently landed. Each one records what was decided and, more usefully, what was rejected and why — the alternatives section is the part that saves the next person the argument.

A design here is not a promise that the work shipped as described. Each carries a status line; read that first, and take seriously any section naming what was designed and deliberately not built.

Design	Status
Install, adopt, upgrade	Built, bar two items it names
Body-owned configuration layers	Proposed — depends on the Incubator PMC and ComDev

One document per subject, describing the result rather than the phases it was built in. While a design is being implemented it may be split into plans; when the work lands, the plans are folded back in and deleted. A reader arriving later wants the decision and the rejected alternative, not the task list that got there — and git keeps the task list.

These sit outside tools/spec-loop/specs/, which is the durable record of what the framework guarantees. A design argues for a change; a spec states what the shipped system does. When the two disagree, the spec is right.