Decision: Record adoption—not rewrite—of the existing course platform

[alexeygrigorev]

Normative decision: Open decision 2

Recorded owner direction

Adopt the existing course-management platform from clean commit 98a235283904b4ef9ad29e196298540756cf1bcc by literal filesystem copy and evolve it in place. Preserve tracked Django behavior and characterize it before model change. Original migrations are copied first; Django-supported squashing is permitted only after parity and upgrade/import verification.

Non-goals

This decision does not perform the copy, Course→Cohort refactor, or silently omit inconvenient business logic.

Acceptance criteria

• Owner direction above is treated as resolved and referenced by the dedicated copy/adoption implementation issue.
• Adoption issue separates unchanged-copy proof from later structural refactoring.
• Spec/ADR records source commit and migration-squash constraints.

Validation scenarios

Review the adoption issue and verify it requires literal cp, source manifest/checksums, unchanged characterization pass, original migrations before squash, fresh-install parity, and production-like upgrade/import compatibility.

Dependencies

Implementation depends on #1. Structural course work under #5 depends on the adoption baseline.

[alexeygrigorev]

Resolved by the owner direction captured in the project planning conversation: adopt the existing course platform from clean commit 98a235283904b4ef9ad29e196298540756cf1bcc via literal copy, preserve behavior first, and permit migration squashing only after parity and upgrade/import verification. Implementation is tracked in #30.