Reading and importing

What a reader checks, and what an importer does, so that a bundle written by one system reads the same in another.

Checks

A reader rejects a bundle, saying which file and why, when:

POF.md is missing, or its type, format and revision are not Bundle, pof and a revision it reads.
A file outside extensions/ is not part of the layout.
A piece’s type does not match its folder (policies/…/POLICY.md with type: Role), or its name does not match its folder’s slug.
A piece has no title, or a slug is not valid.
A kind is not one of its family’s.
An attribute does not hold against its type: a required one is missing, or a value has the wrong shape.
A subentity’s type does not match its folder, or it sits in a folder its family does not have (rules/ under an objective).
A link’s role is not one of the five roles, or its to is not a piece of the bundle.
A HISTORY.md comes without COMMITS.md, or names a commit, a subentity or a link that is not there.

An importer checks everything before writing anything: a bundle is taken whole or not at all.

Import

Identity by folder. The importer gives each piece its own ids; what identifies a piece is its folder, and links are resolved from paths.
With history, it keeps commit ids, dates and actors, so the organization arrives with its past.
Without history, the bundle is a creation: one commit by whoever imports it, a create for every piece, subentity and link.
Extensions it does not know stay as they are. It does not read them, drop them or rewrite them, binaries included.
Access is not imported because it is not there: keys, credentials and connections’ secrets are set up again by whoever imports.

Writing

A writer produces the same bundle for the same content: keys in a stable order, subentities in their order, the manifest dated by the last commit rather than by the moment of export. Two exports of an unchanged organization are then byte for byte the same, and a diff between two exports shows exactly what changed.