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gen-vars — den-agnostic pure-nix vars/secrets library + den adapter

Date: 2026-05-31 Status: Design (brainstormed, design-workflow synthesized, adversarially critiqued, all open questions resolved) Companions:

• nixpkgs PR #370444 (lassulus, upstream vars) — the proven generator model this extracts the pure algebra from.
• ~/Documents/repos/sini/agenix-rekey — the system-agnostic decoupling precedent (extraConfigurations, node-by-config.age).
• 2026-05-31-settings-stratification-injection-design.md — the Spike 5 genBind.wrap injection pattern the gen/ integration demo mirrors.
• 2026-05-27-den-pragmatic-fleet-features.md §Spike 1 — the original (Clan-shaped) sketch this supersedes.

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Settings Stratification + Parametric-Aspect Injection — gen-aspects demo (Spike 5)

Date: 2026-05-31 Status: Implementation-ready design (brainstormed, two adversarial design rounds, live-eval verified) Scope: the gen-aspects examples/demo as the proving ground for fundamental composition constructs. One new pure function in gen-algebra; everything else is demo wiring. No den-repo changes. Companions:

• 2026-05-27-den-pragmatic-fleet-features.md — Spike 5 (settings stratification) this realizes.
• 2026-05-31-config-policy-precedence-research.md — grounds the default < env < host < policy ordering.

Load-bearing claims flagged [V] were verified by live nix eval against the local repos (gen-aspects/lib, gen-bind/nix/lib/wrap.nix, gen-algebra/pure/rec.nix) during design.

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Den x Clan — Introductory Meeting

Date: Friday, June 6, 2026 Time: 9:00 AM PDT / 18:00 CEST Venue: https://jitsi.clan.lol/den Format: 45 min structured + optional 45 min freeform

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Structured Segment (45 min)

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Gen Aspects Demo: Full-Stack Composition Showcase

Date: 2026-05-27 Status: Design approved Location: ~/Documents/repos/gen-aspects/examples/demo/ Libraries exercised: all 8 (gen-algebra, gen-schema, gen-aspects, gen-scope, gen-graph, gen-select, gen-bind, gen-derive)

Goal

A self-contained flake that exercises every gen library in a realistic scenario: a web application deployment with environments, hosts, services, policies, settings composition, and queries. Not a toy — a miniature version of what den v2 will do.

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Gen Type Unification: Pluggable Entry Types, Aspects on Schema, Settings

Date: 2026-05-27 Status: Design approved Libraries affected: gen-schema, gen-aspects, gen-algebra, gen-scope Consumer: den (wiring only — no gen-level domain concepts) Supersedes: 2026-05-27-gen-settings-design.md (draft)

Problem

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Service Coordination, Dependency Graphs, and Composable Blocks — Addressing clan-core#6655

Date: 2026-05-27 Context: clan-core#6655 — "The future and scope of Clan relative to other Nix-based self-hosting solutions"

Related: Den × Clan Collaboration Proposal

Related: Gen Ecosystem Integration Opportunities for Clan-core

Related: [den/gen-internal] Den Pragmatic Fleet Features — Learning from Clan, Bridging Strategy

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Den × Clan — Interoperability Exploration

Date: 2026-05-27 Authors: Den maintainers Audience: Clan-core maintainers and community

What We're Learning from Clan

We've been studying Clan's architecture and we're genuinely impressed by several designs we want to learn from:

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Den Pragmatic Fleet Features — Learning from Clan, Bridging Strategy

Date: 2026-05-27 Companion to: 2026-05-27-clan-gen-integration-analysis.md (what gen offers Clan) This document: What den should borrow (functional gaps only), the bridging strategy, and the roadmap.

Framing

Den and Clan solve overlapping problems differently. Den has ~100s of users and strong formal foundations: scope graphs, algebraic composition, demand-driven evaluation, multi-class output, and the ability to materialize any output target (NixOS, darwin, homeManager, terraform, devshells, packages, treefmt, nix-unit, flake-parts perSystem) from a single aspect graph. Clan has a slightly larger user base and launched earlier, but forces NixOS module evaluation for every entity and can only target nixos/darwin.

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Gen Ecosystem Integration Opportunities for Clan-core

Date: 2026-05-27 Context: Analysis of clan-core architecture against the gen library ecosystem to identify where gen's formal foundations could strengthen Clan's fleet management.

Background

Clan-core is a mature Nix framework for declarative multi-host fleet management. It provides an inventory-driven model where machines are declared, services define roles, and instances bind roles to machines. 30+ production services ship with the framework, alongside a CLI, GUI app, and Python tooling ecosystem. It uses flake-parts, NixOS modules, and a structured scope key system (buildScopeKey/checkScope) for export isolation.

Gen is an eight-library ecosystem providing formal foundations for configuration composition: scope graphs (Neron 2015), algebraic graph composition (Mokhov 2017), demand-driven attribute grammar evaluation (Vogt 1989, Sloane 2010), intensional id

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gen-derive — Stratified Rule Dispatch with Fixpoint Convergence

Date: 2026-05-25 Status: Draft Depends on: gen (pure tier: mkIntensional, intensionalEq) for core; gen-select for adapter tier

Purpose

gen-derive is a rule dispatch engine for guarded graph transformations. Given a set of rules (condition + action producer), a position in a graph, and a context, gen-derive answers: "which rules fire here, and what actions do they produce?" It owns the dispatch protocol, phase ordering, fixpoint convergence, conflict resolution, and rule dedup. It does NOT own the action vocabulary — actions are opaque tagged values whose semantics belong to the caller.