D661 - Three roots, not one

Status: measured Date: 2026-09-09

One root was doing three jobs

Everything the corpus fetched landed under titles/, because that was the only root there was. So titles/ps5-payloads-mirror/BackPork_0.1/BackPork_0.1.elf sat beside titles/PPSA28061-app0/, and the compatibility table listed twenty-five one-file homebrew ELFs as though they were installed titles. A shell drawing the library would have shown them the same way.

They are three different things:

kind	what it is
title	a directory with a param.json, an eboot.bin and its own filesystem
payload	one executable somebody runs directly
package	something not installed yet - the input side of installation

The path model made this cheap, and that is the point of it

orbistoun-paths hangs every location off data_root and resolves that root once. Adding payloads/ and packages/ was two constants, two accessors and two lines in named_dirs - and because named_dirs is the single registration point (its own doc says so), they were picked up by all_dirs, by ensure_dirs, by the containment test and by orbistoun-cli paths without being mentioned anywhere else.

Portable mode needed no work at all, which is the property that split was built for: portable resolves a different data_root and everything follows. A directory resolved separately would have had to be taught about portable mode, and would have been the one that escaped its root.

The manifest says where, and --titles still means what it says

A corpus source now carries target = "titles" | "payloads" | "packages", defaulting to titles

• what every source was before there was anywhere else to put one. sync routes each source to its own root and prints where it went.

The three roots are derived from the titles root rather than resolved independently, so pointing --titles at a scratch directory takes payloads and packages with it. Resolved separately, two of the three would follow the override and one would quietly keep writing to the real data directory

• which is the shape of bug that takes a day to find.

One mapping function, shared by sync and run, so a guest cannot be looked for somewhere it was never put.

What this does not do

The manifest still has one origin per source. Per-item source lists with fallback - try a local build, then a release URL, then give up and carry on to the next item - is asked for and not built. So is the vocabulary change (Prospero / Trinity / Neo), and the two shell surfaces that would list packages and payloads. Each is recorded as wanted rather than half-done.