ADR-A39: Semantic release assembly and provenance ledger

Status: Accepted Date: 2026-09-19 Supersedes: none Related: Phase 3, ADR-A26, ADR-A27, ADR-A28, ADR-A31, release integration architecture

Context

An OCI artifact can be syntactically valid while lacking required semantic approval, impact, profile, or canonicalisation evidence. Release-stack receipts also need an auditable LATTICE record without duplicating registry, workflow, deployment, or storage implementation details.

Decision

Require ReleaseRequirements on every release intent, carrying profile identity and revision hash, canonicalisation version, approval evidence digest, and impact evidence digest. SemanticReleaseAssemblyService verifies generated outputs, unique immutable graph references, and the policy-required semantic gates before a release stack adapter is invoked.

Record semantic intents, adapter receipts, and correlated lifecycle events through ReleaseLedger. Receipt recording requires a prior semantic intent. Project these records through ReleaseProvenanceProjector to deterministic N-Triples for later storage in an RDF provenance graph. The ledger and projection store release-facing evidence and correlation references only, not RDF payloads or generic release-stack state.

Consequences

• A release stack cannot package an intent until LATTICE has evidence for approval, determinism, impact, and parity under the default Surface policy.
• Surface lifecycle callers must supply requirements explicitly. They cannot infer approval or impact evidence from UI state or a receipt.
• In-memory ledger behavior and deterministic RDF provenance projection are testable now. JdbcReleaseLedger persists canonical intent and receipt evidence plus ordered event records in PostgreSQL. Integration with an RDF dataset and PostgreSQL integration tests remain required before Phase 3 is authoring complete.