RFC 0005: Pack discovery

• Status: Draft
• Type: Standards-track (candidate profile) + product (service)
• Created: 2026-07-24

This is an open proposal, not part of the specification. See RFC 0000 for the process and evidence bar.

Summary

A portable index format for describing a collection of Judgment Packs so that tools can list, search, and select packs across catalogs. This RFC standardizes the discovery format; it does not standardize any hosted registry service.

Problem

"How are packs discovered?" has no answer today — registry is mentioned nowhere as a defined artifact. Without a shared index, a pack authored in one place cannot be found or selected by a tool built elsewhere, which undercuts the reuse the format promises.

Evidence

OCI registries, npm, and the Terraform registry each separate a format (an index/manifest schema) from a service (a running, authenticated host). The format is what makes clients interoperable; the service is a product. Discovery here needs the same split.

Specification (sketch)

A discovery index enumerates entries, each referencing a pack manifest (RFC 0001) by (id, version) with digest, plus coarse selection metadata (decision question, domain hints). A client can fetch the index, filter locally, and resolve the underlying pack by digest. The index is data; how it is served, paginated, authenticated, or billed is out of scope.

Alternatives

• No change — no cross-tool discovery; reuse stays local.
• Manifest-only — discover by crawling manifests; workable at small scale, but an index is needed for search.
• Service-first — define an API before a format; rejected, because it couples clients to one host.
• Product-only for the service — correct: the running registry is a product; only the index format is a candidate for the specification.

Compatibility

Additive, optional profile built on RFC 0001. No change to core packs.

Security and privacy

Discovery indexes are an integrity and disclosure surface: entries must be verifiable by digest, and publishing a pack's decision question to a public index may leak intent. Selection metadata is a hint, never authorization to run a pack.

Conformance

Positive: an index whose entries resolve to existing manifests with matching digests. Negative: dangling entry; digest mismatch; malformed selection metadata.

Implementation

Two clients should filter the same index to the same candidate set and resolve the same bytes for a chosen entry.

Unresolved questions

• Index granularity: one index per catalog, or federated indexes?
• How does discovery relate to a selection interface (RFC 0004) without pulling product context into the format?
• Signing and provenance: in this format, or deferred to a separate integrity RFC?