First full run on the KVM host surfaced three harness bugs and two stale image URLs; all fixed here. Harness bugs: - Liveness probe used `bot-bottle --version`, which the CLI does not implement (unknown args die non-zero) — so every SUCCESSFUL install was misreported as "no runnable entry point". Switched to `bot-bottle --help`, which exits 0 before any DB/migration/network work. - cmd_down never removed serial.log, so its rmdir failed and every run left an orphan scratch dir behind. Added serial.log to the cleanup. - The teardown trap was armed AFTER cmd_up, but cmd_up's wait_for_ssh can fail with QEMU already running (a guest that never opens SSH) — leaking the VM. Arm the trap before cmd_up. Stale image URLs: - Fedora 41 is EOL and 404s; bumped to Fedora 44 (44-1.7). - Alpine bumped to 3.21.7; its cloud images ship a .sha512 only (this verifier is sha256), so SUM_URL is now empty (skip) with a note. Validated on delphi (QEMU 11.0.2): ubuntu/fedora/arch pass BOTH test and test-ready. Alpine (cloud-init seed not applied → no SSH) and NixOS (no upstream cloud qcow2) remain blocked on image provisioning, documented in the research note as follow-ups. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Research notes
Investigations into a question or a design space — landscape surveys,
tradeoff analyses, "should we do X or Y," assessments of an approach
before (or instead of) committing it to a PRD. A research note is where
the thinking lives; a PRD is where a decided feature lives, and a
decision record is where a settled choice lives (see
../README.md for picking between them).
Notes are opinionated. They reach a conclusion rather than dumping a neutral survey — the point is to move a decision forward and leave a durable record of why it went the way it did.
Naming
kebab-case-topic.md, named by subject and not numbered (unlike
PRDs and decision records). Pick a name that says what was
investigated: bash-vs-python-vs-go.md, pipelock-assessment.md,
issue-tracking-vs-in-repo-decision-history.md.
Shape (freeform)
There's no fixed template — use whatever structure fits the question. In practice most notes share a loose shape:
- Open with the question — a sentence or two on what's being investigated and why it came up.
- Lead with the verdict — a
## Summarynear the top stating the conclusion, so a reader gets the answer without reading the whole thing. - Then the analysis — whatever the argument needs: comparison tables, per-option sections, failure-mode walkthroughs, the axes that actually matter.
- End with a recommendation when the note exists to drive a decision.
Keep the reasoning self-contained and grounded: cite sources, link files and PRDs, and prefer concrete evidence from this repo over generic claims — a note should stand on its own without a chat log or a Gitea thread. When a note's recommendation gets acted on, capture the resulting decision in a PRD or a decision record; the note stays as the "why we looked into it," not the system of record for the choice.