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Author SHA1 Message Date
Kgothatso Ngako
0be31803f2 docs: record phase 10, and the deferred decision it carries out
`docs/subgroups.md` was written as ten phases of reasoning kept in the order they
were argued, and phase 4 spent forty lines on why the child's ceremony was *not*
held in the parent's Marmot room -- explicitly so the decision would not be
re-litigated without its price attached. That section is now a shopping list that
has been carried out, so it keeps its argument and gains a pointer forward, and
the three costs it enumerated are checked off one by one in a new phase 10.

The parts of the note that state the old arrangement as present-tense fact are
updated rather than annotated: the three-ceremonies table now reads one room,
three ceremonies, two quorums, and says the thing that needs saying twice -- an
MLS message reaches the whole tree, so a ceremony in the parent's room has to name
who it is with.

Phase 10 itself is written the way the others are, around what fails silently:

- `DkgSession.chatRoomId` stopped identifying a ceremony, and the place that
  matters is `completedKey`'s last fallback, which every member welcomed after a
  group's own ceremony lands on;
- `signingPath` had to admit a Marmot room, which widens the one function whose
  contract is that a path never comes off a proposal;
- the p-tags had to stay on both transports, which is the opposite of what
  `FrostSigningManager` correctly does.

The two sections that argued the old collision -- "The collision this buys" and
"Why a subgroup cannot be the whole group was withdrawn" -- keep their reasoning
and gain the end of it: `(room, parent)` stopped telling two subgroups of one
parent apart, so the lookup moved to `(room, parent, admins)`, and the permanent
half of the refusal disappeared with the derived room. The limitation and the
appendix entry are struck through rather than deleted, since what they were
weighing is why the phase exists.

`docs/shared-key-ceremony.md` no longer says a ceremony runs over a NIP-17 chat.
The participant set is the proposal's p-tags on both transports, and that
distinction is the whole reason it is stated that way rather than as "the group".

`docs/mls-skipped-keys.md` keeps `proposeRitual` in its table of reliable
triggers and now says what changed about it: it reached that table on gift wraps,
where the bug does not apply, and a subgroup's ceremony now rides group events. It
is the entry with the worst consequence -- a ChillDKG cannot finish until every
participant takes part, so one lost round-1 message stalls it permanently for
everybody rather than costing one member a line of chat. That is the thing the
quartz fix in that note is now load-bearing for.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-09 16:28:28 +02:00
Kgothatso Ngako
45cc80b538 feat(marmot): put a # in front of every group's name, and retire (#admins)
Some checks failed
Material Design conformance / budgets (push) Has been cancelled
Material Design conformance / tests (push) Has been cancelled
A device's room list holds two unrelated kinds of room and nothing on a row said
which. A NIP-17 room is a conversation between the people in it. A Marmot room is
a *group* -- an id its key derives, a membership baked into an MLS tree, admins
who can act for it, a signature anyone holding the id can check -- and the two
behave differently enough that guessing is a mistake.

`"Ekklesia (#admins)"` was an attempt at saying so, and it marked the wrong half.
Only the admin room got it; a subgroup got no marker at all, so as soon as a group
had one child, half the Marmot rooms on the device were unmarked. It also sorted
nowhere near the group it belonged to, and a truncated row drops a trailing suffix
first -- so the marker was missing exactly where the list is crowded enough to
need it.

**The rule is `MarmotGroupName.of`, and it runs where a room is minted rather than
where it is drawn.** The name is baked into the epoch-0 `MarmotGroupData` every
member is welcomed with, so a `#` added at display time would be a name this
device alone could see. `#Ekklesia` marks both kinds of group room, and marks them
at the front.

**Three mints, because there are three ways a Marmot room comes into existence.**
`MarmotGroupCreation.create` is the funnel for two of them -- the admin room a
group opens after its ceremony, and a subgroup -- and normalising there means
neither caller has to remember. The third, `SelectChatRoomTypeViewModel`'s
convenient room, has a random id rather than a derived one, so it has no key state
to adopt and no admin set to bake in and does not pass through that funnel; it
applies the rule itself.

**Idempotence is load-bearing, not tidiness.** A subgroup's name is derived twice
from the same bare ceremony-room subject, by two callers that never see each
other: `SubgroupManager.proposeBirthCertificate` normalises the name the parent's
quorum is asked to sign, and `MarmotGroupCreation` normalises the name the room
carries. Those two have to be the same string, or the subgroup is not called what
its parent certified -- and a certificate is a signature over the name, so a
verifier comparing them would see a real mismatch. `of` being idempotent is what
makes them agree by construction rather than by both sites being kept in step.

**The ceremony room keeps the bare name.** It is a NIP-17 room -- where a subgroup
is made, not the subgroup -- and prefixing it too produced two identically-named
rows, which spends the mark to say nothing. `Translators` (the ceremony) now sits
beside `#Translators` (the group it stood up), which is the distinction the `#`
exists to draw. Its subject is trimmed, so the bare name and the two normalised
ones cannot differ by whitespace.

**The `#` is drawn beside the name field, not pushed into its state.** `name` in
`SelectSubgroupAdminsViewModel` stays bare and the M3 `prefix` slot shows the
convention, because normalising on every keystroke moves the caret out from under
somebody halfway through a word. The coordinator still reads the name they are
about to get.

Four strings lose the old name -- "Create the #admins group" becomes "Create the
admin room", and the three about what "the #admins room" will sign with now say
"the admin room". Their keys are renamed with them, since the keys in this
catalogue are derived from the text. Around twenty comments, two screen previews
and seven test fixtures follow.

Docs: the ceremony note states the convention and what it replaces, and the
subgroups note's name-field section is rewritten -- it had been arguing from the
`"${parent.subject} (#admins)"` synthesis that no longer exists.
`docs/mls-skipped-keys.md` keeps its `"Frosty (#admins)"`: that is a captured
debugging log, and rewriting it would falsify a record.

Three tests. `MarmotGroupNameTest` pins the rule, idempotence included.
`MarmotGroupCreationJvmTest` pins the funnel -- a bare name in, `#Ekklesia` on both
the room row this device draws and the group data every other member reads.
`SubgroupManagerJvmTest` pins the pair that has to agree, by reading the proposed
event's tags back out of the signing session: the name the parent is asked to sign
is the name `MarmotGroupCreation` will give the room. That last one needed the
signable-parent fixture to seed host keys, since a ceremony's signer ids are
derived from them rather than stored.

**Rooms that already exist keep their names.** The name lives in the epoch-0 group
context, so renaming one is an MLS commit every member has to process -- a
different change from a naming convention, and not made here.

403 common tests, 726 jvm tests, `m3Audit` meets every budget with 0 title-case
strings and 0 dp literals.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-09 11:41:30 +02:00
Kgothatso Ngako
b99cb8fcd5 docs: write down the shared-key subsystem and how Marmot membership fails
First docs in the repo -- README.md is still the stock KMP template. Three
documents plus an index, covering the parts whose behaviour is not recoverable by
reading the code: where the reasoning lives in a protocol, where a failure mode is
silent, or where a decision looked arbitrary and was not.

marmot-membership.md is the one that earns its place. Everything about adding a
member compiles, the invite reports success, and a member simply never appears --
and the reason is never in the invite code. It records that
inviteMemberToChatRoom hardcodes isOneMemberInitialGroupCreation = false and that
ChatRepository does not expose it, so every group invite takes the deferred-welcome
path including the first, when the group is still just its creator and the commit
has no audience at all. Then why that is silent rather than noisy:
MarmotInboundManager refuses future-epoch messages outright, on both wire formats,
with no queue and no replay, so a commit arriving before its recipient's welcome
is dropped and that member never advances. EPOCH_RETENTION_WINDOW retains past
epochs and does nothing for messages from ahead. Three options are set out with the
per-invite correctness table, including the honest limit that the recommended one
narrows the race without closing it.

shared-key-derivation.md argues why the paths are not BIP32 -- no chain code
exists, hardened derivation is impossible rather than unimplemented, and a FROST
tweak takes the scalar as input so the chain code leaves the problem entirely. It
records the x-only serialisation trap avoided by choosing the scalar directly, and
states the rule that must not be broken: never reconstruct a derived key in the
clear, because k = k' - t hands over the group key rather than one derived key.

shared-key-ceremony.md covers the seven kinds, the three approval gates and why
the coordinator's aggregations are deliberately not among them, faults as values
rather than exceptions, and the transcript's idempotency-by-construction. It also
writes down the invariant that produces no error when broken: pendingApproval must
mirror the gates in advance, or the screen offers an approval that does nothing --
or none while the ritual sits still.

Every factual claim was checked against the source rather than recalled, which
turned up one correction worth having: there are two future-epoch refusals, for
PrivateMessage and for Commit, so the drop covers both wire formats and not just
one.

Each document leads with the failure mode rather than the architecture, on the
grounds that a failure is what sends somebody to docs in the first place, and each
lists its known gaps -- including that none of this has run on a physical device.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-05 14:39:19 +02:00