- Feature Name: `event-vocabulary` (one named event stream, three consumers)
- Start Date: 2026-08-24
- Status: Draft for review
- Depends on: RFC 0001 §4 (event bus), §5 (disposability), §6 (CI), §8 (OLTP)
- Source authority: fossil `www/hooks.md` and `src/alerts.c` (both read from
  the mirror this forge serves), GitHub's webhook event reference, Gitea's
  webhook documentation, GitLab's project webhook events

## Summary
[summary]: #summary

quarry names the things that happen in a repository, once, in a vocabulary
that pipelines, webhooks and notifications all subscribe to. An event is a
**noun and an action** — `ticket.closed`, `landing.opened`, `branch.created` —
carried on the bus that already exists, with a payload shape declared per noun.

A pipeline runs from one of three sources, and only the first is an event:
something **happened**, the **clock** said so, or a **person asked** (§2.3).
Schedules and ad-hoc dispatch are repository configuration gated on fossil's
`a` capability, so a repository's own admin owns them (§2.4).

Today there are two and a half paths and no vocabulary. Webhooks derive an
event's kind by slicing a notification's idempotency string. CI does not use
events at all: it polls the index for new check-ins behind a per-repository
watermark. Notifications have their own workflow names. Adding one more
trigger — a landing opening, say — means either a third path or generalising
anyway, so this RFC generalises first.

The vocabulary is the load-bearing part, and the reason this is an RFC rather
than a commit: a pipeline definition names events in its `on:` clause, so an
event name is a **published interface**. Renaming one breaks every pipeline in
every repository that used it, in a system where the pipeline definition is
itself a versioned artifact in someone else's store.

## Motivation
[motivation]: #motivation

### What exists

`ci.Trigger` runs after every fold. It asks the index for check-ins newer than
a watermark, reads `ci/*.json` at each one, registers the definition **at that
check-in**, and starts a run. `pollCI` later polls unfinished runs and, on a
terminal status, mints a `ci-pass` / `ci-fail` tag on the check-in.

That is a complete, working pipeline trigger for exactly one event, with the
event's identity left implicit. Four things in it are check-in-shaped:

| | today | needed |
|---|---|---|
| trigger | poll `NewCheckins(watermark)` | subscribe to a named event |
| payload | `{repo, checkin, branch, date, user, comment, cloneUrl, pipeline}` | per-noun, common envelope |
| watermark | one check-in per repository | per subscription |
| verdict sink | `WriteTag(verdict, checkin, runID)` | per-noun; a landing wants a reply |

Every one of those blocks the landing trigger (quarry ticket `49323c33`), and
none of them is made easier by doing the landing trigger first.

### What the field does

Four vocabularies were read before proposing a fifth.

**Fossil hooks** (`www/hooks.md`) are artifact-level and carry no semantics at
all. Three types — `after-receive`, `before-commit`, `commit-msg` — and the
after-receive hook's stdin is a list of artifact hashes with human-readable
descriptions. There is no "on branch created" or "on merge". The doc states
its purpose plainly: to "start up a background testing or CI process".

**Fossil alerts** (`src/alerts.c`) carry fossil's only semantic vocabulary, as
subscription letters on the `subscriber.ssub` column:

    a Announcements          c Check-ins            f Forum posts
    n New forum threads      r Replies to my posts  t Ticket changes
    u User permission changes  w Wiki changes       x Edits to forum posts

Eight types. It splits the forum four ways by verb, and has no event for a
branch, a tag, a technote or a merge.

**GitHub** publishes 75 webhook events, most of which are not about version
control: roughly six VCS core, fifteen collaboration, eight CI, ten security
scanning, fifteen governance, and twenty platform and commerce events
(marketplace, sponsorships, apps, Pages, Projects). quarry has a concept for
about twenty of them. **Gitea** publishes about 27, **GitLab** 15.

### The shape decision

The three forges disagree about the axis, and the disagreement is the design
question:

- **GitHub**: one event per noun, with an `action` field. `issues` fires for
  `opened`, `closed`, `labeled`, `assigned`, `edited`.
- **Gitea**: one event per noun-verb pair. `issue_assign`, `issue_label`,
  `issue_milestone` and `issue_comment` are four separate events.
- **GitLab**: coarse nouns, verbs folded into the payload.
- **Fossil alerts**: mostly nouns, but `f`/`n`/`r`/`x` split the forum by verb.

**quarry takes GitHub's.** Under Gitea's rule every new verb is a new
permanent event name, and the name is a published interface. Under GitHub's, a
subscriber can ask for `ticket` and get every change, or `ticket.closed` and
get one, and adding a verb later costs nothing. Fossil's split shows the cost
of the other choice inside one product: `f` and `n` and `x` are three names
for three verbs on one noun, and a subscriber who wants "any forum activity"
must name all three and remember to add the fourth when it appears.

## Guide-level explanation
[guide-level-explanation]: #guide-level-explanation

An event is `noun.action`. A subscriber names either the whole noun or one
action of it:

    "on": ["checkin.created"]                  one action
    "on": ["ticket"]                           every action on the noun
    "on": ["landing.opened", "landing.reopened"]

A pipeline with no `on:` clause runs on `checkin.created`, which is today's
behaviour exactly, so every pipeline already in a repository keeps working
without being edited.

Every event carries the same envelope, and a payload keyed by its noun:

```json
{
  "event":  "landing.opened",
  "repo":   "quarry",
  "at":     "2026-08-24T09:48:57.123",
  "actor":  "dmestas",
  "id":     "activity:landing:9802c157…",
  "payload": { "landing": "9802c157…", "branch": "wiki-struct", "target": "trunk" }
}
```

`id` is the idempotency key. It is stable for one occurrence of one event, and
it is how a consumer that sees an event twice can tell that it has.

## Reference-level explanation
[reference-level-explanation]: #reference-level-explanation

### §1 The vocabulary

Nouns and their actions. An action marked † is not yet raised by any code path
and is reserved so that adding it later is not a vocabulary change.

| noun | actions | payload |
|---|---|---|
| `checkin` | `created` | hash, branch, parents, user, comment |
| `branch` | `created`, `moved`, `closed`† | name, tip, previous tip |
| `tag` | `created`, `removed`† | name, target, value |
| `ticket` | `opened`, `changed`, `closed`, `reopened` | id, title, fields changed |
| `wiki` | `edited`, `created`, `deleted` | title, hash |
| `technote` | `created`, `edited` | event id, hash |
| `forum` | `posted`, `replied`, `edited`†, `moderated` | thread root, post hash |
| `landing` | `opened`, `commented`, `accepted`, `rejected` | id, branch, target |
| `ci` | `started`, `completed` | run id, checkin or landing, verdict |
| `mirror` | `pulled`, `failed` | url, artifacts received |
| `repo` | `created`, `removed`, `settings` | name |
| `clone` | `cloned`, `fetched` | actor or anonymous, artifacts sent |
| `account` | `added`, `caps`, `removed` | account, repository, caps |

Fourteen nouns, thirty-odd actions. For comparison: fossil's alerts name eight
things, GitHub's 75 events name about twenty that quarry has a concept for.

**Clone counts.** `clone.*` is observable because every sync request goes
through one place: `Fronter` proxies `POST /r/{repo}/xfer` and already runs a
`ReadGate` per request, so the choke point exists. Counting *fetches* is free
at that point. Distinguishing a **clone** — a first fetch by a peer holding
nothing — from an incremental pull requires reading the request body, since
that distinction lives in the sync protocol's announcement and nowhere else.
Both counts are operational per §2.1 and so are recorded in OLTP as they
happen; the bus carries notice of a row that already exists.

GitHub reports clones and *unique cloners* separately. Uniqueness needs an
identity to count by, and a sync request may be anonymous, so quarry counts
unique by account where there is one and reports anonymous clones as a
separate figure rather than guessing at a person behind an address.

Three of these exist in no other forge, and are here because quarry has the
concept and an operator needs the hook: `technote` (fossil has the artifact
but no alert for it), `mirror` (a forge that tracks 25 upstreams needs to fire
on a failed pull), and `landing`.

### §2 What the bus is, verified

Read from `internal/events/events.go` rather than assumed, because §2's
promises depend on it:

```go
desired := &nats.StreamConfig{
    Retention: nats.LimitsPolicy,
    Discard:   nats.DiscardOld,
    MaxBytes:  1 << 30,   // 1 GiB ceiling across all repos
    MaxAge:    time.Hour, // live window; older needs a reindex
}
```

**The stream is a one-hour live window, not a log of record.** It is a
transport between the store and the index, and the durable truth is the pair
either side of it: the store (authority) and the publisher cursor in the KV
bucket, which advances only after a fold succeeds. A consumer that falls
outside the window does not catch up by replaying; it rebuilds from the store.

Two consequences this RFC must respect rather than wish away:

1. **A consumer down for an hour has missed events permanently.** CI's current
   watermark-and-poll survives that, because it reads the index, which is
   durable. A naive move to bus subscriptions would trade a robust trigger for
   a fragile one — §2.1 is how that is avoided.
2. **Per-node durable consumers each read the whole stream** (limits retention
   was chosen over work-queue for exactly this: every node must fold every
   event). So three consumers subscribing independently is the shape the bus
   was already built for.

### §2.1 Two classes of event, and why the distinction is load-bearing

The one-hour window is survivable for some events and not others, and the line
is whether the event is derivable from the DAG:

**Derived events** — `checkin`, `branch`, `tag`, `ticket`, `wiki`, `technote`,
`forum`, `landing`. Every one is a reading of artifacts the store holds. A
consumer that missed one can re-derive it by walking the index, exactly as the
ingest pipeline rebuilds after a gap. A missed event costs latency, not truth.

**Operational events** — `ci`, `mirror`, `repo`, `account`, `clone`. None of
these is in the DAG. `mirror.failed` is a fact about a network attempt;
`account.caps` is OLTP state; a clone is a request that happened. If the
delivery is missed, the fact is gone.

So operational events MUST be recorded in OLTP as they are raised, and the bus
carries a notification of a record that already exists. Derived events need no
such backing — the store is their backing.

This is not symmetry for its own sake: it is the difference between a
`mirror.failed` an operator can page on and one that silently did not happen.

### §2.2 Delivery semantics, which the medium decides

Fossil's hook documentation states the constraint, and quarry inherits it
rather than choosing it:

> A push might not deliver all of the artifacts for a checkin. If Fossil knows
> that a /xfer HTTP request is incomplete, it will defer running the
> after-receive push for 60 seconds, or until a complete /xfer request is
> received. This helps to prevent after-receive hooks from running when
> incomplete checkins exist in the repository, **but it does not provide hard
> guarantees, as there is no way to do that in a distributed system.**

So:

1. **At-least-once.** A consumer may see an event twice. `id` is the
   idempotency key and a consumer that acts on an event MUST be idempotent
   under it. quarry's own notification plane already works this way.
2. **Possibly batched.** Fossil warns that two pushes' artifacts "might be
   combined into a single after-receive callback". quarry's fold has the same
   property; a single fold can produce many events, and a consumer must not
   assume one event per delivery.
3. **Possibly partial.** An event may describe state that is still arriving.
   A consumer that needs the whole picture reads the index at handling time
   rather than trusting the payload to be complete.
4. **Ordered within a repository, not across.** The bus preserves order per
   repository because the fold does; nothing orders two repositories against
   each other, and nothing should be written that needs it.

### §2.3 Three trigger sources, of which events are one

A pipeline runs because something happened, because the clock said so, or
because a person asked. Only the first is an event, and conflating the three
is how "on:" ends up meaning two different things.

| source | `on:` | what it carries |
|---|---|---|
| **event** | `checkin.created`, `landing.opened` | the event envelope of §1 |
| **schedule** | `schedule: "0 * * * *"` | the fire time and the ref it runs against |
| **dispatch** | `dispatch: true` | the actor and any inputs they supplied |

This is GitHub's split (`schedule`, `workflow_dispatch`) and it is the right
one: a cron run has no actor and no artifact, and a dispatched run has an
actor but nothing happened. Forcing either into the event envelope would mean
a payload full of fields that are empty by construction, which is how a schema
stops meaning anything.

**Schedules and dispatches are OLTP state**, not artifacts. A schedule is a
forge configuration — which repository, which pipeline, which cron expression,
enabled or not — and it is exactly the shape of the existing `webhook` table.
Both are per-repository, and both survive a reindex because neither is derived
from the DAG.

**Ad-hoc runs need no new engine.** dagnats already registers a workflow from
a definition and starts it with an input map; that is what `ci.launch` does
today. A dispatch is the same call with a different input, and a schedule is
the same call on a timer. What is missing is not execution but the record of
what should run and when, and the surface to manage it.

### §2.4 Who may schedule and who may dispatch

Both are repository configuration and both spend the engine's time, so both
follow RFC 0004's rule for configuration: they take **`a`** — fossil's Admin
capability, the same letter that already gates `repo.update`, `repo.reindex`,
`ticket.config(write)` and the mirror verbs.

That answers "repo admins should have these" in fossil's own vocabulary rather
than by inventing a role: an account holding `a` on a repository can create,
edit, disable and delete its schedules, and can dispatch a run. An account
without it can see that a schedule exists — a pipeline that runs nightly is not
a secret from the people reading the repository — and cannot change it.

Deliberately NOT a new capability letter. RFC 0004 §6's rule is that a letter
which exists in fossil carries its fossil meaning and a surface which exists
only in quarry names an existing letter rather than minting one; a forge that
grows private letters stops being a fossil forge by increments.

One consequence worth stating: **`a` excludes `s`**, so a repository admin may
schedule work on their own repository and not on anyone else's, and a
fleet-wide schedule is a site-admin action. That falls out of the cap model
rather than needing its own rule.

### §3 Handlers do not run inside the fold

Fossil again:

> Fossil holds a write transaction on the repository while the after-receive
> hook is running.

A hook that writes to the repository it was fired by therefore deadlocks. The
same is true here for a different reason: quarry mints artifacts through the
lease holder, and the fold is not it.

**An event handler that mints an artifact runs outside the fold, through the
lease holder, asynchronously.** The CI verdict already obeys this by accident
of structure — `pollCI` runs on a timer, not in the ingest path. This RFC makes
it a rule rather than an accident, because the landing verdict (`700b22b6`)
would otherwise be written from exactly the wrong place.

### §4 One stream, three consumers

| consumer | today | after |
|---|---|---|
| webhooks | `Raise()` from `fireNotify`, kind sliced out of a TxnID | subscribes by name |
| CI | polls `NewCheckins` behind a watermark | subscribes by name |
| notifications | own workflow names | subscribes by name |

The watermark does not disappear: it becomes per-subscription rather than
per-repository, because two consumers may be at different positions and one
falling behind must not advance the other.

### §5 Verdict sinks

A CI run's verdict is an artifact, because 0001 §6's no-hostage rule says the
result must clone with the repository. Which artifact depends on the noun that
triggered it:

- `checkin.created` → a `ci-pass` / `ci-fail` **tag on the check-in**, as today.
- `landing.opened` and `landing.commented` → a **reply in the landing's
  thread**. A landing is a forum thread; a verdict is commentary on a moment,
  a moving branch earns several, and tags do not accumulate. This is the shape
  quarry ticket `700b22b6` settled on and this RFC does not revisit it.

The rule generalises: **the verdict takes the shape of the thing it judges.**

### §6 What is deliberately absent

Named so the absence reads as a decision rather than an oversight:

- **No security scanning events.** GitHub has ten. quarry scans nothing, and
  an event for a scan nobody runs is a promise to nobody.
- **No package or registry events.** quarry hosts no packages.
- **No marketplace, sponsorship, or app-installation events.** These are
  GitHub-the-product, not forge-the-idea.
- **No `star` or `watch`.** quarry has subscriptions, which are a truthful
  signal about wanting to be told things; stars are a popularity one.
- **No `fork`.** A zit clone is not an event in the origin: the origin does not
  learn of it, and an event it cannot honestly raise should not be named.
- **No `before-*` events.** Every event here is a statement that something
  HAPPENED. A veto hook — fossil's `before-commit` — is a different mechanism
  with different failure modes (what does a forge do when a hook times out?),
  and mixing "tell me" with "may I" in one vocabulary is how both get harder.

The last one is the one most likely to be asked for later. It should be its own
RFC, and it should not reuse these names.

## Drawbacks
[drawbacks]: #drawbacks

**A published vocabulary is hard to change.** That is the point, and also the
cost: a name chosen badly here is one every pipeline in every store repeats.
The mitigation is the reserved actions in §1 and the noun-plus-action shape,
which absorbs new verbs without new names.

**One stream is a single point of failure** where today CI's polling is
independently robust: if the bus stops, CI stops. The watermark survives, so
nothing is lost, but a stalled bus becomes a stalled forge in a way a stalled
poll loop is not. §2's at-least-once rule and per-subscription watermarks are
what make recovery a replay rather than a repair.

**Schedules and dispatches put quarry in the business of running things
nobody asked for at that moment.** A cron pipeline consumes engine time on a
repository whose owner may have forgotten it exists, and unlike an event-driven
run there is no push to point at. The `a` requirement in §2.4 bounds who can
create one; nothing here bounds how many, and a per-repository ceiling is
probably wanted before this ships.

**Fourteen nouns is more than fossil has and fewer than GitHub.** Both
comparisons will be made, and neither is the argument: the set is what quarry
can honestly raise today plus what it will raise next.

## Rationale and alternatives
[rationale-and-alternatives]: #rationale-and-alternatives

**Do the landing trigger without a vocabulary.** Rejected: all four
generalisations in the motivation table are needed for it anyway, and the
result is a third trigger path. Ticket `49323c33` says so in its own words —
"rides the existing event plane … rather than growing a second trigger path".

**Adopt fossil's after-receive shape: hand the handler a list of artifacts.**
Rejected. It is honest and it is what fossil does, but it pushes the whole
interpretation problem to every consumer: each pipeline would re-derive "is
this a new branch" from artifact hashes, and they would derive it differently.
quarry already folds artifacts into meaning; the event stream should carry the
meaning it already has.

**Adopt Gitea's noun_verb naming.** Rejected in §Motivation: every new verb
becomes a permanent name.

**Use GitHub's names verbatim where they overlap.** Tempting for
recognisability, and rejected in two places: `issues` is called `ticket` here
because that is what fossil calls it and fossil compatibility is the north
star, and `pull_request` is called `landing` because it is not one — nothing
is transported and nobody requests a pull (zit#127).

## Prior art
[prior-art]: #prior-art

- **fossil** `www/hooks.md`: three hook types, artifact-level, no vocabulary.
  Its warning about distributed delivery is quoted in §2 and is the reason
  this RFC does not promise exactly-once.
- **fossil** `src/alerts.c`: eight subscription letters, the only semantic
  event vocabulary fossil has.
- **GitHub**: 75 events, noun-plus-action. The layering (VCS / collaboration /
  CI / security / governance / platform) is the useful part; most of the
  events are for products quarry does not have.
- **Gitea**: ~27 events, noun_verb.
- **GitLab**: 15 coarse events, verbs in the payload.

## Unresolved questions
[unresolved-questions]: #unresolved-questions

1. **Does `branch.moved` fire per check-in or per fold?** A ten-commit push
   moves the branch once but creates ten check-ins. Firing per fold makes
   `branch.moved` cheap and coarse; firing per check-in makes it redundant
   with `checkin.created`. Leaning per fold, with the check-in count in the
   payload.
2. **Should `ci.completed` be subscribable?** It would let a pipeline trigger
   on another pipeline, which is either composition or a foot-gun. GitHub
   allows it (`workflow_run`) and guards against recursion. Deferred until
   something needs it.
3. **How does a subscription express "my repository only" versus fleet-wide?**
   The webhook plane is per-repository today; CI is per-repository; a
   fleet-wide subscriber (an operator watching `mirror.failed` across 25
   stores) has no way to say so.
4. ~~JetStream delivery guarantees have not been traced.~~ **Resolved** and
   folded into §2: the stream is a one-hour window with limits retention and
   per-node durable consumers, and the durable truth is the store plus the
   publisher cursor. The consequence — that operational events need OLTP
   backing and derived ones do not — is §2.1.

## Future possibilities
[future-possibilities]: #future-possibilities

- **Veto hooks** — fossil's `before-commit` and `commit-msg`, as their own RFC.
- **Fleet-wide subscriptions**, resolving question 3.
- **Event replay** — the bus retains the log, so "re-run every pipeline for
  the last hour" is a cursor rewind rather than new machinery. Attractive
  after an outage, and dangerous without §2's idempotency rule.
- **`ci.completed` composition**, resolving question 2.
- **Traffic beyond clones.** Once `clone.*` is recorded, page views and unique
  visitors are the same shape and the same storage. Worth doing only if
  somebody asks: a forge that counts everything it can is how an OLTP that was
  "small by construction" stops being.