D292 - The knowledge merge rule lives in orbistoun-hle

Status: decided Date: 2026-08-26

Record and KnowledgeFile::merge live in orbistoun-hle::knowledge: a field is replaced only when given, lists append without duplicates, and a behaviour claim without a stated source is refused. merge returns provenance faults as a list; shims only locate, read, write and print.

Why: the crates are the emulator and a shim holding logic drifts from the other shims. Both the learn command and the measurement loop record findings, and two copies of the merge would soon disagree about the refusal that is its point. The caller decides whether a fault refuses input or declines to record, so it is a list, not an error.

Rejected:

• The merge in orbistoun-cli: a second caller would copy it.
• A mirror of the provenance vocabulary in the dispatcher: two vocabularies for the one thing that must be checkable.