Files
mantra-kmp/docs/curated-to-mantra.md
Kgothatso Ngako b796a32be3 docs: plan the pull of Curated's work back into Mantra, and the tool that makes it mechanical
Curated (remote `curated`, curated/curated-kmp) forked from this repository at
ba26c0b1 on 2026-09-09 and has landed thirty-nine commits since: a group's own
nostr identity, curated lists over kinds 31888-31890, sign-in with a recovery
phrase, an nsec or an npub, a back button on every pushed screen -- and two
rebrands, 744 and 765 files each, underneath all of it. docs/curated-to-mantra.md
is which of that Mantra wants, in what order, and how it lands under Mantra's
names. docs/scripts/curated-unbrand.py is the rewrite the plan depends on, and
docs/README.md gets the row.

**The plan is measured, not argued, and that is its whole claim to be read.** The
obvious way to write it was to reason from the commit list about what would
conflict. Instead the method was run to the end on a scratch worktree before a
sentence was written: Curated's history rewritten into Mantra's names, replayed
onto origin/mantra with `rebase --rebase-merges`, built for both targets, and put
through jvmTest, testDebugUnitTest and the m3 audit. Every number in the document
is from that run -- 37 of 39 commits replay, 3 conflicts with known resolutions,
1,036 jvm tests and 530 common tests at 0 failures, all audit budgets met, Room
regenerating nothing -- and the appendix records it so the next reader can tell a
drifted number from a wrong method. A plan whose mechanics had not been tried
would have been a list of hopes about seven hundred renamed files.

**Mantra has not moved since the fork, and that decides the shape of the
problem.** The merge-base of the two branches is origin/mantra itself, so
`git merge curated/curated` is a fast-forward: it merges nothing and makes Mantra
become Curare, icon, package rename and the deletion of Mantra's own library,
dialects and projects sections included. The document says so before anything
else because it is the one thing git does by default. It also means the pull is
not a merge at all but a translation -- a Curated commit written in Mantra's
vocabulary applies to Mantra as if it had been written there -- which is why a
history rewrite followed by an ordinary rebase works, and cherry-picking the
original commits (every path and every import line in every context wrong) does
not.

**808a3459, which drops the translation sections, is dropped rather than
reverted afterwards, because that was measured too.** The first plan was to
replay everything and restore the sections with a forward commit written against
the final row layout. Trying the drop instead showed git merging 930d37c8,
1e52fc8f and 55664cc7's rewrite of ChatRoomDetailScreen around it without a
conflict: the screen comes out as signing key, the five identity rows, Propose
event, then Library, Dialects, Projects, then Subgroups, with `artifacts` and
`dialects` still on the UI state, and the same 1,036 tests pass --
GroupSignedWorkRowsJvmTest only asserts that Subgroups is below the block. The
one conflict is a modify/delete on a test 55664cc7 deletes anyway. A restore
commit would have been Mantra owning a layout upstream never had.

**Curated lists are pulled although they are not Mantra's product, and the
reasoning is written out in full because it is the only real product question.**
Excluding the five commits is not deleting five commits: the paste flow routes
kind 31889 beside 0, 1 and 10002, broadcast seeds an entry's relays from its
schema, the row restructure builds five rows of which two are these, the
back-button sweep touches the suggestion screens, and 165 of the 306 strings
added since the fork are theirs, interleaved. Carving that out means editing five
other commits by hand and then owning a group screen that conflicts with
upstream's on every future pull. Including it costs no schema, no migration and
no query on a screen nobody opens. The principle underneath is stated as such:
the method only stays cheap while Mantra's tree is a superset of Curated's
non-brand tree, so every feature left out is a permanent seam. If product wants
the two rows gone, that is two lines behind a constant, not surgery.

**The brand line lands as one re-messaged commit of comments, and Torch is
retired natively first.** Run through the rewrite, the two rebrand commits
collapse from 744 and 765 files to sixteen and twenty-one, and what survives is
the reasoning the rebrands added about the names they refused to change -- the
comments on TWEAK_TAG, HOST_KEY_DERIVATION_TAG and Relays.ephemeral and the
paragraph in shared-key-derivation.md. Mantra should have those; the next person
to grep "mantra/" here is as likely to finish the rename as anyone upstream was.
The rewritten d26cf6c7 is a different case: Mantra is still Torch in TorchTheme
(116 references), UserAgent, two error strings, and an iOS config that builds
Torch.app under a bundle id from two brands ago. That is Mantra's own debt and
Phase 0 pays it as MantraTheme and "Mantra", so that CurareTheme maps onto a name
that means something rather than onto the brand before last. Then d26cf6c7' is
dropped in the replay, since its work is done -- the plan was made to say this
explicitly after Phase 0 and Phase 2 were found to disagree about it.

**The normaliser is a script in docs/scripts rather than a description, because
three of its rules were wrong before they were right and prose would have hidden
that.** `\b` does not fire inside snake_case, so `\bcurare\b` misses the string
keys that carry the brand and they need look-around rules that treat `_` as a
boundary. File names carry identifiers, so a path rule that only moves
directories leaves MantraNavHost.kt and CurareNavHost.kt side by side with equal
content. And "Curated" is two words -- the brand in generation one, the
protocol's name at the tip (CuratedSchemaEvent, nostr/curated/, the queue's
"Curated" mark) -- so the bare word is deliberately not a rule and only the
generation-one identifiers are mapped, which is exact because the two commits
written in that generation never use the word as a brand in code. Every rule
matches a brand token and none matches a Mantra one, so the twelve Mantra*
entities, the two mantra/ prefixes and ephemeral.mantra.press cannot be touched by
construction; the check is that the entity-token count does not fall (433 before,
435 after, none lost) and that the rewritten tip compiles, which no missed
identifier would survive. It has a tree mode for `filter-branch --tree-filter` and
a patch mode for `format-patch` files; the consolidated script was re-run on a
fresh export of the tip and reproduces the tree that was built and tested, to the
byte, logo aside.

**The phases are cuts through the graph, not lines of work, so no commit is
replayed twice and the merges are recreated where they were.** The natural
grouping is by feature line, but the lines interleave -- the nsec branch and the
queue fork at the same commit and rejoin at c8de3a1f, the back-button branch
joins the accept flow at fedbe724 -- and two of those merges carry hand
resolutions that a flattened replay would silently lose. Each phase therefore
replays every commit reachable from its cut that the previous phase did not,
`--onto <mantra tip> <previous cut> <this cut>`, and the two conflicts and two
reconcile files that the dry run found sit in Phase 4 with their resolutions
written down as a runbook. The exactness check closes each phase: the diff between
the replay and the rewritten tip must be exactly what was chosen to drop, and
anything else is a rule that is wrong or a resolution that is, found there rather
than in production.

**Phase 6 says what the fork should become, because otherwise this document is
needed again next week.** Every future upstream commit is written in to.curare.*,
and each pull costs the dry run, the review and the prose -- affordable once,
corrosive weekly. The options are given in the order they should be taken:
converge the source package (a Kotlin package is not a brand, and the rebrands'
own messages say the domain is Mantra* everywhere that matters), then invert the
relationship so Curated is Mantra plus a thin brand-and-product series, and only
failing both keep the normaliser maintained beside the code it maps. Two things
already flow the other way and are named: 39fb64b6, since Curated still carries
the dead WalletManagerExtension.kt and one caller, and Phase 0's Torch retirement.

**Several counts in the draft were checked against the data and corrected before
they were committed.** The entity-token figure quoted from the rebrand's message
(1,369) was measured with a different pattern and is replaced by this run's own
(433 -> 435); "roughly 150 of 293" strings became 165 of 306; the back-button
commit touches eight of Mantra's translation screens, not nineteen; and the claim
that nothing in the fork added a DAO method was too strong -- three queries were
added, and the statement now says no table and no migration, with 19.json
byte-identical after a build as the evidence.

The dry run, for the record: normaliser at the tip 812 files rewritten and 806
paths moved; filter-branch over 39 commits in 84 s; replay with the logo and
808a3459 dropped 37 commits, 3 conflicts, 2 reconcile files, residual diff
exactly the logo plus the three files 808a3459 touched;
:composeApp:compileDebugKotlinAndroid and :composeApp:compileKotlinJvm clean;
:composeApp:jvmTest 1,036 tests, 0 failures (Mantra alone: 733);
:composeApp:testDebugUnitTest 530 tests, 0 failures; :composeApp:m3Audit all
budgets met with 12 adaptive uses and 2 navigation components. The scratch
worktree and the tmp/ branches were removed afterwards; the script recreates them
in under two minutes.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-13 11:04:35 +02:00

36 KiB
Raw Blame History

Pulling Curated back into Mantra

Curated forked from this repository on 2026-09-09 and has since landed thirty-nine commits that Mantra has none of: a group's own nostr identity, curated lists over the kinds 31888–31890, sign-in with a recovery phrase, an nsec or an npub, a back button on every pushed screen — and two rebrands, 744 and 765 files each, underneath all of it. This is which of that work Mantra wants, in what order, and how to land it under Mantra's names without touching seven hundred files by hand.

Read nsec-sign-in.md and npub-sign-in.md for the identity work's own reasoning once they arrive (Phases 3 and 5 bring them); nothing here repeats it. shared-key-derivation.md states the one rule this whole exercise is built around — that two strings in this tree are hash inputs and must never be renamed — and the rebrands upstream were careful about it, which is the only reason a mechanical pull is possible at all.

Not built. Phase 1's dry run has been done, once, on 2026-09-13, on a scratch worktree that was thrown away; every number below is measured on that run, not estimated. Written against origin/mantra at ba26c0b1 (with f4434ab1 and 39fb64b6 on the update branch) and curated/curated at 86cb876b. Curated moves daily: the numbers will drift, the method will not.

The shape of the fork

Two remotes: origin is mantra/mantra-kmp, curated is curated/curated-kmp, both on code.sigidli.com. The merge-base of origin/mantra and curated/curated is ba26c0b1 — which is origin/mantra. Mantra has not moved since the fork, so Curated is strictly ahead of it, by thirty-nine commits.

That has a consequence worth stating before anything else. git merge curated/curated into mantra is a fast-forward. It would not merge anything; it would make Mantra become Curare — the package rename, the icon, and the commit that deletes Mantra's own library, dialects and projects sections included. It is the one thing not to do, and it is the thing git does by default.

The thirty-nine are thirty-five ordinary commits and four merges, and the branch structure matters for the phasing later:

*   86cb876b  Merge claude/npub-readonly-signin into curated
|\
| * 3116eb8a … 78807fe9   npub sign-in: 12 commits (Phase 5)
* | 55664cc7  rows on the group's screen
* | fedbe724  Merge curated into the suggestion-accept branch   (carries resolutions)
|\|
| *   ccbdbf7a  Merge curated into the back-button branch         (carries resolutions)
| |\
| * | 0634487e  back button on every pushed screen
* | | 732a4527  accepted entries on the group's screen
* | | fcc19f95  accept a suggestion into the list
| |/
|/|
* | 6ae5a967  broadcast button under each signed event
|/
*   c8de3a1f  Merge curated into the nsec branch
|\
| * 1e52fc8f  the queue of a curated list
* | 2326839e … daae63d5   nsec sign-in: 8 commits (Phase 3)
|/
* 392b90b8  an unsigned event, pasted
* 930d37c8  the lists a group curates (kind 31889)
* 808a3459  drop the library, dialects and projects sections     <- Mantra drops this
* cd3108e9  Update logo                                           <- and this
* e6aee792  rebrand curated -> curare                             <- and the brand line
* 334e6dd1  what the group says out loud (kind 1 posts)
* 4c0ed0c1  the group's own nostr identity (kind 0, relay lists)
* d26cf6c7  retire the brand before mantra (Torch)
* 3bc8be53  rebrand mantra -> curated

Two brand generations sit under the features. 3bc8be53 made the app Curated — press.mantra.* became com.it.curated.*, MantraDatabase became CuratedDatabase, and so on — and e6aee792 made it Curare, to.curare.* and CurareDatabase. The two group-identity commits are written in the first vocabulary; everything from 808a3459 on is written in the second. A pull has to read both.

What the rebrands did not touch is the reason a pull is tractable. Their own messages record it: the twelve Mantra* Room entities keep their names because those names are the SQLite table names; SharedKeyDerivation.TWEAK_TAG and ChillDkgRitualManager.HOST_KEY_DERIVATION_TAG keep their mantra/ prefixes because they are hash inputs; Relays.ephemeral keeps wss://ephemeral.mantra.press because it is a running relay. So on both sides the database is at version 19 with the same nineteen schema files, every table has the same name, every derived key is the same key, and the app talks to the same relay. Nothing in the thirty-nine commits adds a table or a migration — three DAO queries and no entity field; after a full build of the pulled tree Room regenerates nothing and 19.json is byte-identical to Mantra's. Every feature reads off GroupSignedEvent rows that already existed, or off two new files in the node-data directory (nostr-keys.dat, then nostr-credentials.dat). The lightning-kmp-app submodule is pinned to the same commit on both sides, 84cc44c, since f4434ab1 brought Mantra's pin forward.

The inventory

Every commit, grouped by the line of work it belongs to. Sizes are git show --shortstat sums; the brand line's is what a hand-merge would have had to read.

line commits size verdict
A. the brand line 3bc8be53 d26cf6c7 e6aee792 cd3108e9 1,593 files, ±10.5k not as commits. Their residue, yes — see the first decision
B. the group's nostr identity 4c0ed0c1 334e6dd1 40 files, +5.3k pull
C. drop the library, dialects, projects 808a3459 4 files, −228 do not pull. It deletes Mantra's product
D. curated lists 930d37c8 392b90b8 1e52fc8f fcc19f95 732a4527 86 files, +12.7k pull — the third decision
E. broadcast 6ae5a967 18 files, +2.0k pull
F. a back button on every pushed screen 0634487e 50 files, +532 −288 pull — a fix
G. nsec sign-in daae63d5 42f3a697 366b0177 22061601 d61d3560 e3cc23ae 647ee815 2326839e 84 files, +5.3k pull
H. a row per kind of signed work 55664cc7 34 files, +4.1k −1.5k pull, with C dropped underneath it
I. npub read-only sign-in 78807fe9 dc8a1091 15766596 5efeae76 7db863e3 bfad1f39 e31033e8 a586b7c1 315e9331 f866b9d1 67 files, +3.4k pull
J. library chores 00c36ec5 3116eb8a 3 files pull 3116eb8a; 00c36ec5's pin move is already Mantra's
K. the four merges c8de3a1f ccbdbf7a fedbe724 86cb876b — replayed as merges; two carry hand resolutions

B. The group's own nostr identity

A Marmot room's id is the pubkey it signs as, so every group has had a nostr identity since it had a key and no way to say anything about it. 4c0ed0c1 adds the kind 0 and the four relay lists (NIP-65, NIP-17, NIP-50, NIP-51), each proposed to the quorum like anything else the group signs; 334e6dd1 adds kind 1 posts in the group's own name. Both are readings of GroupSignedEvent rows gated on verifies — the room as author, the id as the hash, the signature real — and both close a hole in applyInnerEvent where a group-signed kind would otherwise render as raw JSON in the transcript. The second commit's kind 1 arm is the careful one: it verifies and, on failure, falls through to unsupported rather than dropping the event, because a kind 1 is content somebody meant.

Mantra wants this without qualification. A translation collective is exactly a group that needs a public name, a place to be found, and a way to announce a finished chapter under a key no single member controls. Two commits, no schema, and the tests sign their fixtures with real FROST quorums.

C. Dropping the library, dialects and projects

808a3459 removes the three work sections from the group screen and the two repository reads that fed them. For Curated that was dead weight; for Mantra it is the product. The question was never whether to take it but what taking the later commits costs when it is left out, because 55664cc7 restructures the same screen on top of it. That was measured — see the second decision.

D. Curated lists

The curated-list NIP from the bitcoin.mov repository: a group publishes a schema (kind 31889) defining a list anyone may suggest entries to; strangers publish suggestions (31888) against it; the group's quorum accepts one by signing a canonical entry (31890) that points back at the suggestion. 930d37c8 is the schema and its editor, ported tag for tag with the NIP's own example as the fixture; 392b90b8 is the untyped way in — an unsigned event pasted as JSON and filed by kind once signed, which exists so that npm run schema:dry in the bitcoin.mov repo can be pasted rather than retyped; 1e52fc8f is the queue, every suggestion in reply to a schema, read off the relays the schema named; fcc19f95 accepts one into the list, seeded into a form the schema drives; 732a4527 shows what the group has accepted. All of it lives in a new nostr/curated/ package plus screens, and all of it reads the same GroupSignedEvent rows.

E. Broadcast

Until 6ae5a967 nothing a group signed reached a relay: FrostSigningManager.complete filed the rows and the only way out was the copy button on the key-state sheet. This adds a Broadcast button under every signed event, a screen that shows and edits the relays, sends, and reports what each answered. It deliberately bypasses the durable BroadcastNostrEventRequest queue, because that queue hangs off a NostrEvent row and a group's event must not become one (the home feed would show it as anybody's, and the sync loop would offer it to relays the screen never named). Mantra's groups sign chapters, translations and key states; none of them reach a relay today either.

F. A back button on every pushed screen

Twenty-two pushed screens had no back affordance. Android's system back and iOS's edge swipe hid it; the desktop target, which Mantra also ships, has neither, so those screens were dead ends there. One widget, NavigateBackButton, replaces four spellings of the arrow across forty-one sites; four screens with no app bar got one. Eight of the fifty files are Mantra's translation screens — AddArtifactScreen, AddChapterScreen, AddDialectScreen, ChapterDetailScreen, TranslationChapterScreen and the rest — which Curated kept and fixed.

G. nsec sign-in

Phases 1–6 of docs/nsec-sign-in.md, which arrives with the commits. 42f3a697 puts an Identity type in front of the wallet — the nostr key, the x-only pubkey, the per-identity preferences and an optional PhoenixBusiness — replacing the expression activeWallet?.business?.walletManager?.keyManager?.value?.nostrPrivateKey() at its ten sites and StateFlow<ActiveWallet?> at its twenty-five. 366b0177 lists and starts identities from both stores. 22061601 turns SignInToProfileScreen from the sentence "Sign in is not yet available while Mantra is in alpha testing" into a screen: one field that recognises a recovery phrase or an nsec, confirms the npub it will sign as, and writes the secret before anything else. d61d3560 fixes something not nsec-specific — the sign-in sync asked only ephemeral.mantra.press for the user's profile, so a key that had lived on Damus for three years found nothing; it now asks the indexer relays and follows the user's own kind 10002 one hop. e3cc23ae gives an identity with no phrase a recovery screen for its nsec and the app's first real "forget this key".

The library half — NostrKeyManager when this line was written, NostrCredentialManager by the end of line I — is in lightning-kmp-app 84cc44c, which Mantra's pin already carries; those library commits exist to serve these two lines.

H. A row per kind of signed work

55664cc7 collapses the five identity sections (profile, relays, posts, schemas, entries) into five rows in the shape of the signing-key row, each opening its own screen, because five sections of cards had made the group screen as long as everything the group had ever said. Five routes, screens, view models and states; the broadcast button becomes a widget. It sits on top of C, and how Mantra takes it without C is the second decision.

I. npub read-only sign-in

Phases 1–6 of docs/npub-sign-in.md. 15766596 makes the identity's private key nullable, with canSign as the one place to ask. 5efeae76 replaces nostr-keys.dat with nostr-credentials.dat — one typed entry per public key, secret or public, so a profile signed in read-only and the same profile with its nsec pasted later are one entry, upgraded in one write — and brings the matching library commit, which is 84cc44c, Mantra's current pin. 7db863e3 lists and starts a keyless identity and builds quartz's read-only KeyPair in exactly one place (the trap it guards is KeyPair(privKey = null), which is quartz's "make me a new key"). bfad1f39 recognises an npub in the sign-in field. e31033e8 is the product half: a LocalCanSign composition local, provided once above the navigation suite, hides every action that would need a signature — new chat, follow, send message, key packages — rather than disabling it, and the empty state beside each says why. a586b7c1 is sign out, for a read-only identity only, the first real one in the app.

J. Library chores

3116eb8a adds branch = master to .gitmodules so git submodule update --remote follows the library's default branch; take it. 00c36ec5 moved Curated's pin to 84cc44c; Mantra is already there.

Three decisions

1. The brand line, and what is worth keeping from it

None of the four commits lands as itself. But run through the name-rewrite described below, the two rebrand commits collapse from 744 and 765 files to sixteen and twenty-one, and what is left is not brand at all — it is the reasoning the rebrands added about the names they refused to change: a comment on TWEAK_TAG, one on HOST_KEY_DERIVATION_TAG, one on Relays.ephemeral, a paragraph in docs/shared-key-derivation.md, and the relocation of a stale press/auxiliary template test into the real package. Mantra should have those comments; the next person to touch a mantra/ string in Mantra is as likely to "finish the rename" as anyone in Curated was. Take them as one squashed commit with a new message ("docs: say why the two hash tags and the relay host must never be renamed") and rewrite the sentences that describe rebrands Mantra never had — they are listed under Risks.

d26cf6c7, the Torch retirement, is a different case. Mantra is still Torch in four places: TorchTheme (116 references), UserAgent.APP_NAME and CLIENT_NAME (the client tag on every relay list this app publishes), two user-facing error strings in Kotlin ("tell X to use Torch", "finished setting up Torch"), and iOS, where Config.xcconfig still builds PRODUCT_NAME=Torch under the bundle id ac.aux.compose.Aux — two brands ago. That is Mantra's own debt and Phase 0 pays it natively, as MantraTheme and "Mantra", so that Curated's CurareTheme maps onto a name that means something rather than onto the brand before last.

The logo commit is Curated's icon. Mantra keeps its own.

2. Mantra keeps its sections, and git does the work

Dropping 808a3459 was measured rather than reasoned about. With it removed from the replay, 930d37c8 and 1e52fc8f merged into ChatRoomDetailScreen without conflict (the schema section is inserted where the library section is removed, different hunks), and 55664cc7's rewrite of the screen merged without conflict too. The screen that results reads, top to bottom: signing key, then the five rows, then Propose event, a divider, Library, Dialects, Projects, then Subgroups — ChatRoomDetailUIState.Loaded still carries artifacts and dialects, and mantraRepository is still passed. It compiles for both targets and passes all 1,036 jvm tests, including GroupSignedWorkRowsJvmTest, which asserts only that Subgroups sits below the identity block and does not mind three sections in between.

The one conflict it produces is a modify/delete on GroupNostrProfileSectionJvmTest.kt: 808a3459 had re-anchored that test from the "Library" heading to "Subgroups", and 55664cc7 deletes the file in favour of GroupSignedWorkFixtures and six new tests. Resolution: delete, as 55664cc7 does.

A follow-up Mantra may want, and should write natively rather than pull: the three sections in the same row shape as the five above them, so the screen is one idiom. That is a small change against a settled layout, not a merge problem.

3. Curated lists are not Mantra's product, and Mantra should take them anyway

This is the only real product question in the pull, so the reasoning is set out in full.

Against: kinds 31888–31890 are Curated's reason to exist. A translation collective has no obvious list to curate, and two rows — "Curated schemas", "Curated entries" — appear on every group screen.

For, on cost: excluding the five commits is not deleting five commits. 392b90b8 (paste) routes kind 31889 alongside 0, 1 and 10002; 6ae5a967 (broadcast) seeds an entry's relays from its schema; 55664cc7 (rows) builds five rows of which two are these; 0634487e (back button) touches the suggestion screens; and 165 of the 306 strings added since the fork are theirs, interleaved with the rest. Carving them out means editing five other commits by hand and then owning a group-screen layout that differs from Curated's, so that every future pull conflicts in the same place again. Including them costs no schema, no migration, no query on a screen that does not open them, and a self-contained package under nostr/curated/ whose tests are the NIP's own vectors.

For, on principle: the whole approach below rests on Mantra's tree being a superset of Curated's non-brand tree, because that is what makes the next pull a replay rather than a negotiation. Every feature left out is a permanent conflict seam.

So: pull them. If product decides the two rows should not show on Mantra, hide the two SignedWorkRow calls behind a constant — a two-line, reversible change against a tree that is otherwise identical to upstream — rather than surgery on five commits.

How it lands: rewrite the names, then let git merge

The principle is that a Curated commit written in Mantra's vocabulary applies to Mantra as if it had been written there, because Mantra has not moved since the fork. So the work is not merging; it is translating, once, mechanically, and then replaying history with git's three-way merge doing what it is good at.

Three approaches were considered. Merging curated/curated fast-forwards into Curare, above. Cherry-picking the original commits and fixing up names is hopeless: two 700-file renames mean every patch's paths and every import line in its context are wrong, so every file of every commit conflicts. The third — rewrite the history into Mantra's names and replay it — is what was measured, and it works.

The normaliser

docs/scripts/curated-unbrand.py maps both brand generations onto Mantra, in a tree (for filter-branch) or in a patch file. Its rules are a table of brand tokens: to.curare. and com.it.curated. to press.mantra.; the generated-resources package; the app-level identifiers (CurareDatabase and CuratedDatabase to MantraDatabase, the nav host, the navigation suite, the global, the application, the converters, the shapes, the desktop dir); the theme; the brand string key and its value; UserAgent; APP_DIR_NAME; rootProject.name; the Android applicationId and namespace; the iOS product name and bundle id; and finally the bare words Curare and curare in prose.

Three things it got wrong on the way to being right, each of which will bite anyone who rewrites it:

  • \b does not fire inside snake_case. _ is a word character, so \bcurare\b misses sign_in_is_not_yet_available_while_curare_is and curare_will_delete_the_nsec_for_s_from_this. String keys carry the brand, and need look-around rules that treat _ as a boundary.
  • File names carry identifiers too. CurareNavHost.kt must become MantraNavHost.kt, not just its contents; a path rule that only moves directories leaves MantraNavHost.kt and CurareNavHost.kt side by side with identical content.
  • "Curated" is two words. In generation 1 it was the brand; at the tip it is the protocol's name — CuratedSchemaEvent (158 uses), CuratedEntryEvent, the nostr/curated/ package, and a curated string that marks a queue row the group has taken up. The bare word is therefore not a rule. Only the generation-1 identifiers are mapped, and that is exact because the two commits written in that generation never use Res.string.curated or the bare word as a brand in code.

What it cannot touch, by construction: every rule matches a brand token and none matches a Mantra one, so the twelve Mantra* entities, the two mantra/ prefixes and ephemeral.mantra.press pass through untouched. The check is that the count of Mantra* entity tokens does not go down across the rewrite — 433 in Mantra, 435 in the dry run's tree, two new references and none lost — plus the fact that the rewritten tip compiles, which no missed identifier would survive.

The pipeline

git fetch curated
git branch tmp/curated-src curated/curated
git filter-branch -f -d /tmp/fb --tree-filter 'python3 /abs/path/to/docs/scripts/curated-unbrand.py tree .' \
    -- origin/mantra..tmp/curated-src                                 # 84 s for 39 commits

Now tmp/curated-src is Curated's history in Mantra's names. Its first commit, the rebrand, is sixteen files of comments; its features are Mantra commits that never happened. Replay them, recreating the merges and dropping the two commits Mantra does not want:

git branch curated-pull tmp/curated-src          # the branch that gets rewritten; tmp/curated-src stays as the reference
LOGO=$(git log --format=%h origin/mantra..tmp/curated-src --grep='Update logo' | tail -1)
SECTIONS=$(git log --format=%h origin/mantra..tmp/curated-src --grep='drop the library, dialects' | tail -1)
GIT_SEQUENCE_EDITOR="sed -i -e '/^pick ${LOGO:0:7}/d' -e '/^pick ${SECTIONS:0:7}/d'" \
    git rebase -i --rebase-merges --onto origin/mantra origin/mantra curated-pull

--rebase-merges matters: the two merges that carried hand resolutions are re-performed rather than flattened, so their resolutions are re-asked at the same points instead of silently lost.

What the dry run found

drop the logo only drop the logo and 808a3459 (recommended)
commits replayed 38 37
commits that conflicted 2 3
where strings.xml at the recreated c8de3a1f; CuratedSuggestionListScreen.kt at the recreated fedbe724 the same two, plus GroupNostrProfileSectionJvmTest.kt at 55664cc7 (modify/delete)
files the original merges edited outside their conflicts 2 2
git diff tmp/curated-src HEAD afterwards exactly the logo's 13 files the logo, plus the three files 808a3459 touched — the screen, its view model, its UI state
compileDebugKotlinAndroid, compileKotlinJvm clean clean
:composeApp:jvmTest 1,036 tests, 0 failures 1,036 tests, 0 failures
:composeApp:testDebugUnitTest 530 tests, 0 failures 530 tests, 0 failures
:composeApp:m3Audit all budgets met all budgets met

Mantra's own suite is 733 jvm tests (736 with 39fb64b6); the other three hundred came with the features.

The three conflicts and their resolutions:

at file why resolution
c8de3a1f' strings.xml two branches appended strings at the end of the file keep both blocks
fedbe724' CuratedSuggestionListScreen.kt the back-button sweep and the accept flow both edited the sheet take the original merge's file: git show <original fedbe724, rewritten>:<path>
55664cc7' GroupNostrProfileSectionJvmTest.kt 808a3459 (dropped) modified it; 55664cc7 deletes it delete

And the two files whose changes lived only inside the original merge commits — edits a merge made beyond resolving its conflicts, which a recreated merge that does not conflict will never reproduce:

git checkout tmp/curated-src -- \
    composeApp/src/commonMain/kotlin/press/mantra/compose/ui/composable/AcceptCuratedSuggestionScreen.kt \
    composeApp/src/commonMain/kotlin/press/mantra/compose/ui/composable/BroadcastGroupSignedEventScreen.kt
git commit -m 'reconcile: the two files the original merges edited outside their conflicts'

Then the check that makes the whole thing honest:

git diff --stat tmp/curated-src HEAD     # must be exactly: the logo's 13 files + the three files 808a3459 touched

Anything else in that diff is a normaliser rule that is wrong or a resolution that is, and it is found here rather than in production.

The phases

Each phase ends the same way: :composeApp:compileDebugKotlinAndroid, :composeApp:jvmTest, :composeApp:testDebugUnitTest and :composeApp:m3Audit all green on the branch, and one review of the diff against the phase's stated contents. The phases are cuts through the graph above — each one replays every commit reachable from its cut that the previous phase did not — so the ranges are --onto <mantra tip> <previous cut> <this cut> and no commit is replayed twice.

Phase 0 — Mantra prepares, natively

Nothing from Curated lands. Three things Mantra does to itself so the pull is clean:

  1. Merge the update branch (f4434ab1, 39fb64b6): the library pin at 84cc44c that the identity work needs, and the removal of the app's duplicate nostrPublicKey().
  2. Retire Torch. TorchTheme → MantraTheme; UserAgent.APP_NAME and CLIENT_NAME → "Mantra"; the two error strings; Config.xcconfig to PRODUCT_NAME=Mantra and press.mantra.ios, with the pbxproj's product references. Keep the three Torch records the rebrands kept: material-design-conformance.md:278 and :654, and NavigationRoutingTest's fixture. Then change the normaliser's theme and UserAgent rules — the ones marked in the script — so CurareTheme/CuratedTheme map to MantraTheme and the agent to "Mantra".
  3. Take the protective comments — or leave this for Phase 2, where the rewritten rebrand commits carry them. Either way the commit is squashed and re-messaged, the sentences under Risks are rewritten by hand, and the rewritten d26cf6c7 is dropped in Phase 2 because item 2 has done its work.

Exit: 736 jvm tests, audit green, iOS config no longer says Torch.

Phase 1 — The dry run

The pipeline above, end to end, on a scratch worktree, landing nothing. Its output is the table in the previous section, recomputed against the day's curated/curated. If a number moved, find out why before Phase 2: a new conflict means a new upstream commit touched a seam; a non-empty exactness diff means a new brand token the normaliser does not know. Delete the worktree and the tmp/ branches when done; the script recreates them in under two minutes.

Phase 2 — The group's identity, and the lists' read side

Cut at 392b90b8': 4c0ed0c1, 334e6dd1, 930d37c8, 392b90b8, with 808a3459 dropped. The three rewritten brand commits are ancestors of this cut too: if Phase 0 took the protective comments and retired Torch natively, drop all three — their whole content is already on Mantra and replaying them re-applies it; if Phase 0 skipped item 3, squash 3bc8be53' and e6aee792' into the one re-messaged comments commit and drop d26cf6c7'. Four feature commits either way, no conflicts in the dry run.

What to look at in review: the applyInnerEvent arms (the kind 1 arm must fall through to unsupported, not return null); that GROUP_IDENTITY_TYPES renders as a RitualNotice and not a bubble; that CuratedSchemaEventTest still parses the NIP's example verbatim under Mantra's package.

Exit: group screen shows profile, relays, posts and schemas as sections above Library; tests green.

Phase 3 — Sign-in with a recovery phrase or an nsec

Cut at 2326839e': the eight commits of line G, including the plan and its record. The Identity refactor touches eighteen files' signatures; the dry run applied it without conflict, but on top of Phase 0's 39fb64b6 expect two trivial ones — 42f3a697 removes the press.mantra.compose.extensions.nostrPublicKey import from RelaysSocketManager and NavigationViewModel, and 39fb64b6 had already replaced that line with the library's import. Resolution: delete the line; the call it served is gone too.

What to look at: SignInToProfileViewModel.commit writes the secret before it does anything else; SignInSync's bootstrap set is the indexer relays plus ephemeral.mantra.press, not ephemeral alone; NsecRestoreRoundTripJvmTest asserts no node ran.

Exit: a pasted nsec signs in on desktop and Android; NostrSecretScreen reveals and forgets it.

Phase 4 — The queue, broadcast, accepting, the back button, the rows

Cut at 55664cc7': 1e52fc8f, the recreated c8de3a1f, 6ae5a967, fcc19f95, 732a4527, 0634487e, the recreated ccbdbf7a and fedbe724, 55664cc7. All three conflicts and both reconcile files live here; the table above is the runbook.

What to look at: the group screen's order (signing key, five rows, Propose event, Library, Dialects, Projects, Subgroups); every screen reached by navigate(...) has a back button on desktop; BroadcastGroupSignedEventScreen sends through EventPublishTransport and not the broadcast queue; defaultRelaysFor an entry is its schema's relays.

Exit: the exactness diff is the logo plus the three files 808a3459 touched; audit budgets met, as in the dry run.

Phase 5 — Read-only identities

Cut at 86cb876b': the ten commits of line I, 3116eb8a, and the final merge. No conflicts in the dry run. 00c36ec5's pin change is a no-op against Mantra's pin and can be dropped or left; dropped is cleaner.

What to look at: Identity.toKeyPair is the only place a quartz KeyPair is built from an identity; ProvideSigningCapability sits once above the navigation suite; the migration from nostr-keys.dat runs before the first listing and leaves an unreadable old file in place with an error rather than silently losing identities.

Exit: an npub signs in read-only, every signing action is hidden with a reason beside it, sign out removes it and re-lists.

Phase 6 — Close the loop

Two things flow the other way, and one decision closes the reason this document exists.

Reverse-pull 39fb64b6. Curated still carries the app-side WalletManagerExtension.kt and one caller (CreateProfileViewModel), while its own identity code already uses the library's nostrPublicKeyHex(). The same normaliser runs backwards with its rules inverted, or — for one small commit — it is a hand cherry-pick.

Reverse-pull Phase 0's Torch retirement, so both trees agree that CurareTheme and MantraTheme are the same thing under two names. That, too, is one commit.

Then decide what the fork is. Every future Curated commit will be written in to.curare.*, and every pull will need this pipeline again. With the tooling in place the machine work is minutes and the conflicts are the three above; the cost is the dry run, the review and the prose — call it half a day per pull, an estimate. That is affordable once and corrosive weekly. The options, in the order they should be taken:

  1. Converge the package name. A Kotlin package is not a brand — the rebrands' own messages say the app's domain is still Mantra* everywhere that matters — and if Curated moved its source back to press.mantra.* while keeping to.curare as its applicationId, Curare as its rootProject.name and CurareTheme as its theme, the diff between the two trees would shrink to a handful of files and every pull in either direction would be a plain cherry-pick. It costs Curated one more rename, its fourth, and this time the last.
  2. Invert the relationship. With the packages converged, Mantra is the natural upstream: Curated becomes Mantra plus a short brand-and-product patch series (the applicationId, the theme colours, the icon, the section removal, APP_DIR_NAME) rebased on top of Mantra's main. Features are written once, on Mantra, and Curated takes them by rebasing. This is what the current fork already is in content; it is only the history that says otherwise.
  3. Keep pulling. If neither is wanted, keep curated-unbrand.py maintained beside the code it maps, redo Phase 1 before every pull, and treat a non-empty exactness diff as a bug in the script.

Risks, and the silent ones in particular

The five names. Mantra* entities, the two mantra/ prefixes, the relay host, and — on Mantra's side — nothing more. The normaliser cannot touch them; a hand edit can. The check is git grep -c 'mantra/' composeApp/src and the entity token count before and after, and :composeApp:jvmTest, which is what catches a renamed table.

Prose that lies after a rename. A blanket rewrite turns "survived two rebrands — Mantra to Curated, Curated to Curare" into a sentence about rebrands Mantra never had. Eight places, ten lines, all in the rewritten brand commits or the docs, all needing a human sentence: Relays.kt:9, SharedKeyDerivation.kt:65, ChillDkgRitualManager.kt:95, PlatformContext.jvm.kt:48–56 (a whole block about APP_DIR_NAME keeping the old brand, which is false for Mantra and should go), HomeScreen.kt:167, docs/shared-key-derivation.md:68–69, docs/material-design-conformance.md:656–657, and the strings.xml header comment. Rewrite them in Phase 0 or Phase 2's squash, not later.

strings.xml grows from 377 to 670 strings and conflicts by appending at every branch join. Keep both blocks. Do not rename the curated string: it is the queue's "Curated" mark, product vocabulary, and the normaliser leaves it alone on purpose.

Merges that did more than resolve. Two files; the reconcile step; the exactness diff catches any third.

Test anchoring. GroupSignedWorkRowsJvmTest asserts Subgroups is below the identity block. It is, with three sections between. GroupNostrProfileSectionJvmTest is deleted upstream and stays deleted.

iOS is unverified on every side of this. The rebrands say so, the dry run ran on linux, and Phase 0's Config.xcconfig change is the first time this repo will have named itself there. Build it on a Mac before believing it.

Data on disk moves nowhere. Desktop APP_DIR_NAME stays mantra; the new nostr-credentials.dat sits beside seed.dat in the node-data directory; the migration from nostr-keys.dat is idempotent and refuses to delete what it could not read. An existing Mantra install sees new files and no moved ones.

The upstream moves. Between this repository's previous fetch of curated/curated (cd3108e9, 2026-09-10) and the one this plan was written against (86cb876b, 2026-09-12) it gained thirty-three commits. Redo Phase 1 the day you land; the numbers drift, the method does not.

Appendix: the dry run, for the record

Run on 2026-09-13 against curated/curated at 86cb876b, on a scratch worktree of origin/mantra at ba26c0b1, with lightning-kmp-app at 84cc44c symlinked in from a populated checkout.

measurement value
normaliser at the tip 812 files rewritten, 806 paths moved
rewritten 3bc8be53 (rebrand 1) 16 files, +61 −38
rewritten d26cf6c7 (Torch retirement) 5 files, +16 −10
rewritten e6aee792 (rebrand 2) 21 files, +85 −63
rebrand 2 after normalising both sides only sentences that describe the rebrand itself
filter-branch over 39 commits 84 s
replay, logo dropped 38 commits, 2 conflicts, 2 reconcile files, exactness = logo
replay, logo and 808a3459 dropped 37 commits, 3 conflicts, 2 reconcile files, exactness = logo + the 3 files 808a3459 touched
compileDebugKotlinAndroid + compileKotlinJvm clean, both variants
jvmTest 1,036 / 0 failures, both variants (Mantra alone: 733)
testDebugUnitTest 530 / 0 failures
m3Audit all budgets met; 12 adaptive uses, 2 navigation components
Room schemas found at press.mantra.compose.database.MantraDatabase/ 19
Mantra* entity tokens (`MantraArtifact Chapter