Rendered from docs/decisions/0085-a-live-document-that-rests-on-a-draft-one-is-reported-over-every-relation-because-a-draft-leaves-no-record-to-cite.md in the Headwater corpus. Every document on this half of the site is typed by the taxonomy the descriptor names: corpus.json.

A live document that rests on a draft one is reported over every relation, because a draft leaves no record to cite

Context

#569 reported two gaps. No rule reported a live document that rests on a draft one. A shelf of obligation records also stayed at draft after the merge that activated them, and nothing reported that.

The owner ruled on both questions on 2026-09-26, in a comment on the issue. The words of the first ruling are: "A current document that cites a draft one: not silent. It is reported as a warning, which is what 0.4's accepted statement says an adopter gets." The words of the second ruling are: "The state an open obligation stands at: current."

lifecycle.dependency.on_terminal is the sibling rule. It reads only a relation that carries lifecycle_sensitive. HW-DR-0065 rules that the published base marks no family beyond succession. In the base, supersedes is the only marked relation, and it writes a state onto its target. So a rule that read the same filter would find no pair in any adopter of the base, and the 0.4 statement would be false.

Decision

lifecycle.dependency.on_initial reports a live document that writes a relation to a document at a state with the role initial. It reads every relation whose two ends are documents. It does not read lifecycle_sensitive.

The rule reads each edge in the direction that its author wrote it. The document that writes the line is the document that cites. So a live document that writes the inverse name onto a draft gets a warning. The relation declares the draft as its source, and that does not change the finding. A draft that writes the inverse name onto a live document gets no warning.

HW-DR-0065 leaves traces_to unmarked for a reason. A live document can cite a retired one correctly, as a citation of the record that the retired document left. A draft leaves no record. The guidance that its state declares is that nothing may rely on it. So no citation of a draft is correct in the sense that HW-DR-0065 protects, and the rule has no reason to read the flag.

One relation is exempt: a relation that declares on_target.set_state. An edge of it states that its target is replaced, and it is not a reliance on the text of the target. The exemption applies at every target state, as the parent ruled. It has a silent case. A live document that supersedes a draft which still stands at draft gets no warning. The base regimes let a draft move only to current or deprecated. So a draft cannot move to superseded, and no verb writes that state onto a target. The draft stays at draft, and this rule does not report the pair.

Two relations of the base are read although neither is a reliance of the writer on the document named. constrains runs from the decision that constrains to the decision it constrains, so a settled decision that constrains a new draft is the usual shape. conflicts_with declares that it is invalid when both ends are current. So a current decision that conflicts with a draft is the only valid shape of that relation with a live end. The rule warns on both on purpose. The ruling is every relation, and the engine exempts a relation only by a declaration that it can read. A live document that constrains a draft, or conflicts with one, names a text that can still change. A declaration on the relation that says it is not a reliance would exempt it, and no such declaration exists yet.

The finding is a warning and never an error. This also applies to a current specification that cites a draft one. The repair is to promote the target, to point the source at a document that stands, or to move the source back to draft. Only the author can choose among the three. CT-LIFE-5 is permanently_advisory for this reason.

An open obligation record stands at current, as the second ruling states and as HW-DR-0052 rules for every document. The thirteen records at draft moved to current in the same change.

Consequences

An adopter of the base gets the finding with no overlay change, over every relation that the adopter declares. The base package declares OB-LIFE-5 and CT-LIFE-5 at 4.9.0.

A target that stands at a state its own regime does not name is skipped. lifecycle.state.not_admitted reports it once. A target with no state is also skipped, and an edge to an anchor forms no pair.

headwater new writes a new document at draft. For a relation that it creates, it also writes the reciprocal half into the live document at the far end. That live document then writes a line to a draft, and it gets a warning until the author promotes the new document. The base supersedes is exempt, so this does not occur for a successor. It does occur for verified_by in this repository, and for every relation that the scaffolder creates and that writes no state. The repair is the one that HW-DR-0052 names: promote the new document before you propose it.

The rule does not find a draft that no live document cites. What files a record at draft in a run is a separate gap.