Defensive publication + clean-room reference implementation. Public prior art establishing that this mechanism was disclosed on 2026-07-03.
This repository publishes, as dated public prior art, a deploy-time admission mechanism that decides whether a candidate build may be applied to a live service by reasoning over the source commit graph — not over pipeline run numbers, image push order, or version strings — and that returns a three-valued PASS / REJECT / ERROR verdict distinguishing "not allowed" from "cannot evaluate."
Continuous-delivery systems guard code integration well (merge queues, required checks) but often leave the deploy step unguarded when multiple autonomous actors — humans or AI agents — can each mutate a live image. Two failure classes result:
- Divergent deploy — shipping an artifact from a commit never merged to the trunk.
- Backwards deploy — re-applying an older artifact over newer already-live work, silently reverting the platform. Every conventional signal (build succeeded, image exists, tag well-formed, timestamp fresh) approves this; only the shape of the source DAG reveals it is stale.
The mechanism admits a deploy only when the candidate commit is (1) an ancestor-or-equal of the integration-branch HEAD (genuinely merged) AND (2) not strictly behind the last-deployed commit that the target cluster itself records in an in-cluster state object. Crucially, before any ancestry query it probes that the commit objects exist locally; on a shallow/partial clone where they do not, it returns ERROR ("cannot evaluate — unshallow") rather than a false REJECT — fail-closed, but honest about why.
To bar others from patenting the disclosed mechanism by placing a strong, enabling, dated description in the public domain. It is defensive: we assert no patent; we prevent one. See DEFENSIVE-PUBLICATION.md for the full disclosure, claims, and prior-art delta.
flowchart TD
A[candidate SHA] --> P{objects present locally?}
P -- no --> E[ERROR: cannot evaluate — unshallow]
P -- yes --> R1{ancestor-or-equal of HEAD?}
R1 -- no --> J1[REJECT: divergent / unmerged]
R1 -- yes --> R2{at-or-ahead of live commit?}
R2 -- no --> J2[REJECT: behind live — backwards deploy]
R2 -- yes --> PASS[PASS — deploy proceeds]
| Path | What |
|---|---|
DEFENSIVE-PUBLICATION.md |
The ~5,000-word disclosure: mechanism, data model, worked example, prior-art delta, claims. |
docs/FIGURES.md |
Diagrams with captions. |
docs/PRIOR-ART.md |
Real references, delta table, honest novelty nub. |
docs/OPEN-SOURCE-APP.md |
How the reference maps to a buildable app + an AKS deployment sketch. |
src/ |
Clean-room, dependency-free, offline-runnable Node.js (ESM) reference. |
cd src
node example.js # prints every worked-example verdict, incl. the incident + shallow-clone ERRORNo dependencies, no network, no cluster, no credentials. The Git oracle and cluster state are injectable in-memory stubs; the decision procedure — the subject of the disclosure — runs in isolation.
The primitives (merge-base ancestry, GitOps, deploy leases, admission gates) are individually old. The disclosed nub is their combination plus the three-valued semantics: DAG-proof ordering, anchored to an in-cluster live-commit reference, with an evaluability/legitimacy split that fail-closes the shallow-clone case as ERROR instead of a false REJECT. GitOps HEAD-only reconcilers achieve implicit monotonicity inside a sole-writer topology; this reifies it into a portable decision function for the interim reality of direct mutations and multiple writers. Full treatment in docs/PRIOR-ART.md.
Dual-licensed:
- AGPL-3.0-or-later — free to use, study, modify, and share under copyleft terms.
- Commercial license — for use without AGPL obligations, available from Gus IT LLC. Contact gus@gusit.de.
Publishing under AGPL does not diminish the prior-art effect: the mechanism is fully disclosed and dated regardless of license.
Author: Gustavo Assuncao, PhD · Publisher: Gus IT LLC (Florida, USA) · Published: 2026-07-03
Trade-secret constants (lease TTLs, backoff schedules, canary thresholds) are withheld and are not required to practice the mechanism.