Privacy-Period-Tracker/docs/history/BATCH_LEDGER.md

# Batch ledger — Privacy: Period Tracker

```
Status: Archived
Owner: _null
Last reviewed: 2026-08-18
Governs: what the batches were, before the tracker held them
Review trigger: Nothing. Superseded by the tracker; kept for the record.
```

## Why this file is archived rather than deleted

Planning used to live in markdown as a numbered batch list. It now lives in the
tracker: **milestones are batches, issues are deliverables**, and severity is
`P0` / `P1` / `P2` / `release-blocker`.

This file is what that list *was*. It is kept because the reasoning in it is
still worth reading, and deleted files are not readable.

**It must not be updated.** A batch list beside the tracker is a second answer to
"what is open", and two records of the same thing will disagree without saying
which is right. That is precisely why the work moved. If you are tempted to add a
batch here, add a milestone instead.

Its `Status: Archived` is therefore not a nicety — it is the machine-readable
form of "do not treat this as current".

## "Ledger: missing" on the project screen is the correct answer

The Command Center's docs report still looks for a batch ledger — at
docs/planning/FUTURE.md, named here without backticks deliberately, because
`doc-claims.sh` treats a backticked path as a claim that the file exists and
this one must not — and reports it as **missing** for every repository that has
moved planning into the tracker. That is the expected state and not a gap to
close: the report's own contract is that a tracker-first project shows a missing
ledger and no batch percentages.

Creating that file to turn the line green would rebuild, in a new name, the
exact second record this one was archived for.

## Period never had one

This repository adopted the tracker convention in its **first commit**, so there
was never a markdown batch list here to migrate. Nothing was lost and nothing was
archived; the milestones in the tracker are the only record this project has ever
had of what a batch is.

The file is kept anyway, and only for the section above it: the explanation of
why "Ledger: missing" is the correct reading on the project screen is worth
having in every repository that will show it. Recreating a ledger to turn that
line green would build, in a new name, the exact second record this file exists
to warn about.

Written into `Status: Archived` rather than deleted so the reason survives
somebody wondering, in a year, whether a batch list ought to be added.