Rendered from docs/obligations/0041-no-declaration-expresses-a-rule-about-content-or-state-over.md in the Headwater corpus. Every document on this half of the site is typed by the taxonomy the descriptor names: corpus.json.

No declaration expresses a rule about content or state over time

Context

The decision-record tradition holds two invariants, and the language expresses neither. An accepted record is amended by succession and never by edit, which reads a content change against a lifecycle state. A proposed record reaches a ruling, which reads dwell time in a state.

Every declaration that carries time is a participation expectation, and an expectation reports one thing: a missing edge inside a window. Both failures above have every edge that they need.

Obligation

The language owes a declaration for a rule over content change and a rule over dwell time.

Discharge

The entry declares each as an obligation with a gap disposition, and each names an engine input that already exists. Spec 12 supplies the prior version as needs_prior, and taxonomy audit already measures state dwell. So the gap is a declaration rather than a capability, and it is the check class that the second entry adds to this library.