Glossary

Terms are in alphabetical order, one line each. The specification has a vocabulary of its own, defined in its own text, and this is not that list.

Term	Meaning
Artifact	What a tool produces from your policy and acts on. A YAML or JSON file, a plan of changes, or a manifest sent to a server.
Build	One reading of a whole project by a tool. The specification writes it as the set of files, the imports between them, and the build parameters.
chant	The infrastructure toolchain the specification was extracted from. It is an implementation of the specification and declares which version.
Conformance	Whether an implementation gives the verdicts the specification requires. The conformance suite is the set of fixtures and the runner that checks an implementation against them.
Corpus	A body of real projects that nobody wrote for testing, run through two implementations to see whether they agree. chant’s example projects are one; a project nobody here maintains is another.
Data-host profile	The subset of the specification an implementation with no JavaScript runtime implements. It reads files and never runs anything, so an envelope is its output.
Entity	An object a host’s class produces, such as a bucket or a repository. It is opaque to the fold and carries its own identity.
Envelope	A placeholder object the fold writes for something it cannot build without code: a resource, an intrinsic call or a reference to another entity’s attribute. A serializer turns it into output.
Evaluator	A program that folds files. The reference implementation is one in TypeScript; `tsad-eval` is one in Rust.
Fixture	One test case for one rule: a small file or project and the verdict the specification requires for it.
Fold	Reading a file’s values off its text without running the file. The verdict `fold` means that succeeded, and the file’s exports are known.
forgejo-warden	A tool that keeps a Forgejo code-hosting organization in a declared state. It is the first consumer of the reference implementation that is neither this repository nor chant.
Helper	A small function a host supplies for authoring, such as a string transform, that a folded file may call.
Host	The tool reading the policy, as the specification sees it. A host supplies classes and rules, an intrinsic registry and a trust set of packages; the specification says how each is admitted.
Lexicon	chant’s word for a package that supplies the types and classes for one target, such as Kubernetes or AWS.
Policy	The file that says what you want, read by a tool that makes the world match it. On this site it is `governance.ts`.
Pre-synthesis, post-synthesis	The two phases a rule may run in: over the declared values before anything is emitted, or over the emitted artifact. The fold is what makes the first phase possible without running the files.
Profile	A named subset of the specification an implementation may claim. There are two, full and data-host.
Reference implementation	`@intentius/tsad-reference`, an evaluator written from the specification text and nothing else, used to check the text is complete enough to implement from.
Rule over values	A check over what a project declares, across files and resources, as opposed to a type check on one value; tools call it semantic linting. chant’s lexicon rules and forgejo-warden’s guardrails are examples; the specification defines only the contract they run under.
Run	The fallback when a file cannot be folded. The JavaScript engine executes the file and the tool takes whatever the exports hold at the end; the verdict’s reason names the line that made the file a program.
Serializer	The part of a host that turns folded values, envelopes included, into the artifact.
Verdict	The specification’s answer for one file, `fold` with the exports or `run` with a reason.
YAML	The text format most deploy tools read their settings from. It nests by indentation and pairs each key with a value, and nothing in it can check a key exists.