d7 · the shape of the repositories
118 repositories, 75 public; three of them are visited, the rest are invisible, and one change to a boundary costs sixteen pull requests. evidence: repositories audit 2026-10-17.
for folding
- github shows three doors — cyb, cyber, trident — and 68 of 72 public repositories had fewer than five visitors in two weeks; stars spread over sixty repositories never trend, one door does.
- the ontology already says it: a product is the durable thing, a part is never a dependency, a project closes; github's one durable unit is the repository, so a repository should be the door of something that stays.
- the release train's sibling pins, the companion pull requests, the slices waiting on another repository's merge — all are costs of living apart. polkadot-sdk measured the gain of merging: a quarter faster merges each month, companions gone.
- crates.io publishes from folders today; nothing on the package side needs a repository per crate.
against folding
- a repository with its own audience and name is a marketing asset: honeycrisp speaks to Apple Silicon developers who will never open soft3; each warrior speaks to one chain's miners; trident has a site and its own users.
- folding loses what github attached to the old name — stars, watchers, issue addresses — unless the old repository stays as an archived pointer; the numbers at stake are one or two stars per part.
- one queue is longer; ci must filter by path or the Mac runner builds Metal for a typo in a page.
- a week of agent work and a period when two addresses exist for one thing.
proposal
the proposal with the table of moves is soft3/proposals/repositories.md (soft3 PR, 2026-10-17). in one paragraph: a repository is the door of something that stays — a product, a warrior, a network — and its parts are folders of its workspace, published from there; a project that is not yet a product is a folder of one repository, the lab, where the rules are loose on purpose. the owner's corrections of 2026-10-17 are in it: kernel stays three repositories (nox, trident, joy); the neural dialects stay apart; cy, cybernode and cyb merge their parts; the cyberia shelf and optica are still the owner's call.
verdict
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