D213 - Name provenance records proposal and reproducibility

Status: decided Date: 2026-09-26

Every name in the symbol database records how it was proposed, written by the code that found it on the day of discovery and never rewritten: published-standard, generated (a pattern and an index), static (module strings), runtime (call trace, argument dump, probe transcript) or supplied. Evidence and reproducibility tiers are derived from the variant, never stored. The audit re-derives every claim, and supplied never verifies. Databases accumulate.

Why: the hash confirms every name the same way, so provenance describes the proposal, not the proof. A claim that is re-run rather than read makes a forged record fail as loudly as a missing one. A string at rest and a conclusion from a run are different claims with different checks.

Rejected:

• One observed bucket: understates what can be checked.
• Stored tiers: a record could claim a tier its method does not support.
• Overwriting on each sweep: turns a first derivation into a timestamp.