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Decision 0001 — Base-Zero Replanning and Governance Reset

Status: Accepted Date: 2026-01-14 Context version: v0.28.7.post14

Context

Over the course of the Fontshow project evolution, planning artifacts, milestones, and GitHub issues accumulated organically across multiple development cycles.

This resulted in:

  • Heterogeneous milestone naming and scope
  • Partial overlap between roadmap, milestones, and issues
  • Difficulty distinguishing legacy work from newly planned work
  • Reduced clarity for contributors and maintainers

By version v0.28.7.post14, the existing planning model was no longer providing sufficient governance guarantees for continued development.

Decision

A base-zero replanning was performed with the following decisions:

  1. The existing planning artifacts and GitHub milestones were declared legacy and formally archived.
  2. A new planning framework was introduced under docs/planning/, including:
  3. Timeline definition
  4. Phase separation
  5. Milestone model
  6. Atomic action list
  7. GitHub milestones were recreated ex-novo, based on the new planning model:
  8. M1 – Consolidation
  9. M2 – Feature Hardening
  10. M3 – Release Readiness
  11. Existing GitHub issues were audited and reassigned to the new milestones where still relevant.
  12. A semantic distinction between issue origins was introduced via labels:
  13. legacy — issues predating the base-zero replanning
  14. planning — issues derived from the new planning framework
  15. Future planning decisions will be documented as individual decision records under docs/decisions/.

This document represents the formal transition point between legacy planning and the new governance model.

Rationale

This approach was chosen to:

  • Preserve historical context without constraining future development
  • Restore a clear separation between governance (planning) and execution (issues)
  • Improve GitHub readability and contributor onboarding
  • Enable scalable and auditable decision tracking going forward

A single monolithic decisions.md file was deemed insufficient for long-term maintainability at the current project maturity level.

Consequences

  • All legacy milestones are closed and archived.
  • Planning artifacts prior to this decision are preserved under docs/_archive/pre_base_zero/.
  • New work MUST originate from docs/planning/ and be tracked via milestones and issues consistent with the new model.
  • All future architectural or governance decisions SHOULD be documented as standalone files in docs/decisions/.

Follow-ups

  • Optionally introduce an index file for decisions (docs/decisions/README.md)
  • Decide whether to freeze or repurpose the legacy decisions.md file
  • Enforce decision references in future planning documents when applicable

References

  • docs/planning/00_Planning_Document_Set.md
  • docs/planning/01_TIMELINE.md
  • docs/planning/03_MILESTONES_DEFINITION.md
  • GitHub milestones M1, M2, M3
  • The completion of this decision is marked in the repository by the internal tag post-planning-v0.28.7.post14.