Tamale

zongzi isn't 🫔 — this one is.

A minimal kernel for preserving user edits across upstream regeneration cycles. What the user writes is a patch relative to an upstream base; the base regenerates; after each regeneration every patch must be judged still applicable / applicable after transform / dead. That is a three-way merge with an explicit merge-base — the same problem git patch + base + transform rules solves — and this kernel is its smallest honest answer.

Tamale is a greenfield successor designed from a review of zongzi: it keeps zongzi's two-phase survival doctrine and compresses its Anchor + Intervention + Timeline subsystems into a single transport mechanism.

Layering

kernel   : Space(id, order, version) · Op · Anchor/Transport · Patch     ← this package
policy   : relocation choice, clip-vs-conflict, digest chunk granularity ← callbacks
adapters : Tempo→Warp · curve samplers · windowing · score theory · engine bindings

The kernel holds no domain data, no music theory, no engine contract.

The four kernel concepts

• Tamale.Space — a versioned identity space. ids are stable and never reused; every write is an op batch that bumps version and appends to an append-only log. The log is the tombstone record; truncate/2 below the oldest live anchor version replaces GC.
• Tamale.Op — edit intent as a first-class script: Insert / Delete / Split / Merge / Move / Retime. Nothing is re-inferred from state diffs. (diff(old, new) exists only as a fallback adapter for edits that arrive as raw states.)
• Tamale.Anchor + Tamale.Transport — rebase is transport along the log: {:ok, anchor'} | {:clip, covered, lost} | {:ambiguous, candidates} | {:undefined, reason}. Anchor shapes: Ordinal (identity, with an adjacent? predicate for boundary anchors), Metric (coordinate intervals, transported by Tamale.Warp), Relative (identity + offset interval). Coordinates are exact rationals (Tamale.Coord; docs/decisions/0007) — integers promote, floats are rejected everywhere, same doctrine as the digest.
• Tamale.Patch — semantic survival: (base_digest, payload). Digest match → apply; mismatch → conflict. No tolerance, ever. Digests are canonical and portable (Tamale.Digest; spec: docs/spec/canonical-digest.md) — floats are rejected at the digest boundary, because normalizing domain values into canonical form is the channel adapter's job (docs/decisions/0005).

Invariants

• Edit intent is first-class; heuristics live only in the diff fallback.
• Structural survival (transport, at edit time) and semantic survival (Patch.resolve, at render time) are separate phases.
• No tolerance knobs; conflicts surface explicitly.
• Single writer: one linear log. (Offline/collaboration would reintroduce tombstones — as a deliberate extension, not a heuristic.)
• Kernel conventions, not policy: a split's first child inherits the parent id; a merge's into is hd(ids); ids are never reused.

Status: scaffold

Working and tested:

• Space op application with validation, versioning, log, truncation
• Transport for all three anchor shapes:
  • Ordinal (delete/split/merge/move/retime, conjunctive refs, head-state adjacency, boundary_merged when a merge collapses an adjacent? anchor's refs, truncated/future versions)
  • Metric (warp-fold transport; warps come from a Caller provider — the kernel holds no spans; partial survival surfaces as first-class {:clip, covered, lost}; the folded warp is available via Transport.fold_warp/4 for ChannelAdapter.warp_payload/2)
  • Relative (Ordinal-rule host transport; absolute interval derived via Anchor.project/3; offsets may be negative and overhang the host)
• Warp algebra over exact rational coordinates (Tamale.Coord): from_segments/1 (monotonicity-validated assembly), compose/2, invert/1, map_interval/2 — a 1/3 tempo produces thirds, never float dust
• Patch digest resolve over canonical digests (Tamale.Digest — floats/structs/tuples rejected; atom keys encoded by name; spec + worked examples in docs/spec/canonical-digest.md)
• ChannelAdapter.warp_payload/2 — the single channel-adapter callback
• JSON conformance vectors (test/conformance/, format v1): 40 scenarios across space/ordinal/metric/relative/digest/resolve, seeded from zongzi's GOLDEN_SCENARIOS.md including the deliberate semantic flips (G-AN-02 merge, G-INT-05 seconds anchor). Coordinates travel as integers or "num/den" strings; the metric family pins exact rational arithmetic (thirds, composed fractional scales). The Elixir implementation is now the reference runner; other languages implement against the vectors.

Guides and specs:

• docs/zh/guide/caller-guide-zh.md — the Caller orchestration contract (also the equinox migration manual): trio layout, edit-loop op conventions, two-phase survival, warp/digest obligations, engine protocol requirements, self-check list
• docs/spec/canonical-digest.md — portable digest spec v1

Not yet (roughly in order):

1. Warp-provider reference example (tempo map / span tables → segments; adapter layer, mapping open for discussion)
2. diff(old, new) fallback adapter — the one sanctioned home for heuristics, for edits that arrive as raw states (import, reload, collaboration)
3. Chunked digest helper — the pattern is settled (docs/decisions/0006); an optional policy-layer helper module may follow the first real channel

Design decisions: docs/decisions/.

License

MIT (same as zongzi).