check-safety/docs/adr/0001-location-independent-workspace-discovery.md

Location-independent workspace discovery

Decided 2026-08-09. The safety runner located the CMS and orchestrator through hard-coded $HOME/src/blockninja paths and compared repositories as raw absolute strings. The shared workspace can also be mounted at paths such as /srv/agent-work/blockninja. Even when both paths address the same files, the string mismatch caused an explicit orchestrator scan to be classified as CMS; the CMS protobuf namespace filter then removed every orchestrator RPC.

Decision

• Discover the consolidated workspace by walking upward from the current directory, executable directory, and compiled source location.
• Recognize a workspace only when the independent cms, orchestrator, and check-safety Go modules are present.
• Retain $HOME/src/blockninja only as the final compatibility fallback for an installed binary launched outside the workspace.
• Compare existing paths with filesystem identity and resolved symlinks before falling back to cleaned absolute strings.
• Cover non-home workspaces and aliased paths with regression tests.
• Reconcile the registry assertion, golden snapshots, and check catalog with the already-shipped 34th schema-purity check so the runner's own suite is a reliable validation gate again.
• Remove the obsolete core-SDK version helper left behind when check 2c moved to the published plugin SDK, restoring strict unused-code linting.

Consequences

• check-safety ../orchestrator selects the orchestrator.* RPC namespace from any consolidated workspace location.
• Default CMS scans and --orchestrator resolve siblings from the active checkout instead of silently crossing into another checkout.
• Symlink, bind-mount, and alternate mount-path aliases are treated as the same repository when the operating system reports the same underlying directory.

Keywords: check-safety, workspace discovery, /srv/agent-work, $HOME/src/blockninja, orchestrator, CMS, RPC namespace, samePath, symlink, bind mount