Keyboard shortcuts

Press ← or → to navigate between chapters

Press S or / to search in the book

Press ? to show this help

Press Esc to hide this help

Contracts and Conformance

Dubnium publishes contracts when interoperability is useful and disclosure does not require publishing the production implementation behind the boundary.

Suitable published material

  • normative protocol and schema definitions;
  • canonicalization and compatibility rules;
  • request, response, error, state, and evidence envelopes;
  • synthetic positive, negative, and adversarial fixtures;
  • implementation-neutral conformance tests;
  • thin clients, validators, and authoring helpers;
  • minimal no-effect reference implementations;
  • release checksums, software bills of materials, and published attestations.

Published contracts may eventually cover additional capability, scheduling, state, or model-independent interfaces when there is a stable interoperability need. Publication follows usefulness and disclosure review rather than mirroring internal APIs by default.

Material that remains private

  • production planning, prompts, routing, retries, and fallbacks;
  • production policy, approvals, thresholds, and trusted identities;
  • private data ranking, retention, consolidation, retrieval, and stored content;
  • privileged providers, deployment workers, and recovery behavior;
  • host and fleet topology, credentials, operator configuration, and runbooks;
  • real logs, incidents, traces, evidence, and operational measurements.

Compatibility model

Published contracts are versioned and classified by stability. Consumers should pin immutable releases, verify digests and provenance, and exercise conformance tests at their integration boundary.

A contract describes observable behavior. It does not promise a particular internal architecture, service layout, implementation language, deployment model, or provider.

Disclosure model

A contract crosses the publication boundary only when its external value exceeds the cost and risk of maintaining it openly. Private implementation details are not documentation debt merely because a published contract exists.

Source of truth

Specifications, schemas, conformance assets, reference implementations, release metadata, and community documentation are maintained in the Dubnium Community repository.