46 lines
1.6 KiB
Markdown
46 lines
1.6 KiB
Markdown
# History — <Project>
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```
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Status: Current
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Owner: <who maintains this>
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Last reviewed: <YYYY-MM-DD>
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Governs: the narrative of how this project got to where it is
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Review trigger: A decision reversed, a direction abandoned, or a rewrite
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```
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## What this is for
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<The story, in prose: what was tried, what was abandoned, and why. A reader
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arriving in six months wants to know which walls have already been walked into,
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and that is not something a commit log tells them.>
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**This is a record of *then*, never a description of *now*.** That distinction is
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what makes it safe to leave alone as the project changes — a history document
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that gets edited to stay current is not a history, it is a second and competing
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description of the present.
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If you find yourself updating a sentence here because the code changed, the
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sentence belongs somewhere else.
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## Decisions and their reasons
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<One entry per decision that would otherwise look arbitrary later. The reason
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matters more than the decision: "we chose X" ages badly, "we chose X because Y
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was true at the time" survives Y stopping being true.>
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| When | What was decided | Why, at the time |
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| --- | --- | --- |
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| <> | <> | <> |
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## What was tried and dropped
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<The most useful section, and the one most often missing. An approach that was
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abandoned for a good reason will be proposed again by somebody who does not know
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it was tried — including you, in a year.>
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## What this file is not
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- **Not the plan.** That is `docs/planning/PROJECT_PLAN.md`.
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- **Not the work list.** Open work lives in the tracker as milestones and issues.
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- **Not a changelog.** Dated entries go in `docs/history/DEVELOPMENT_LOG.md`.
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