What & why

This repo described itself as "the official governance automation engine for the Palimpsest-MPL ecosystem" — an OCaml policy engine (PLASMA) enforcing a custom license (PMPL), plus an embedded union-contract validator. Investigation found the OCaml engine was 0% built (the README and EXPLAINME.adoc cited .ml source files that were never written), the workspace did not compile (init/migrate embedded a nonexistent license file), 2 parser tests failed on PMPL/PPMPL identifier drift, and the Justfile targeted OCaml tooling the repo doesn't use. The real assets were ~3,300 LOC of working Rust.

Per discussion, this PR pivots the project to what it can actually be: a deterministic, typed policy engine for the agentic era — "does what it is told, absolutely precisely." It's the policy-definition + compliance-evaluation member of a planned trio with somethings-fishy (forensic bot-damage investigation) and did-you-actually-do-that (agent claim verification). The Palimpsest license becomes a separate future project.

Engine v0 (new plasma-engine crate)

• Typed policy AST — subjects, resources, composable conditions, deontic modalities (obligation/prohibition/permission), overlays — transposed from docs/policy-ast-v0.1.adoc to Rust
• Versioned TOML/JSON schema loading with load-time rejection of reserved constructs, so evaluate is total (any policy that loads, evaluates)
• Deterministic fact collection (files, SPDX headers, Cargo version, git HEAD) as the only impure boundary
• Pure evaluator implementing the deontic matrix; BTree ordering → byte-identical output for identical inputs
• Human, JSON, and SARIF 2.1.0 renderers with a stable plasma/<rule-id> namespace for sibling tooling
• Bundled repo-hygiene policy; the repo checks itself in CI (tests/check_selftest.rs)
• Normative spec + Catala-readiness guarantees in docs/engine-v0-design.adoc

CLI

• New: plasma check / facts / policy validate
• audit rewired onto plasma-parser (real SPDX parsing, .plasma.toml zones) via a new scan_repo; init/migrate/badge genericized to any SPDX license (MPL-2.0 default)
• Binary renamed palimpsest-plasma → plasma

Truth + green

• Workspace compiles; 66 tests pass; cargo fmt and clippy -D warnings clean; plasma audit . reports 100%; plasma check . self-passes with 0 violations, deterministically
• Licensing unified: code MPL-2.0, docs CC-BY-SA-4.0; SPDX headers swept (PMPL/PPMPL survive only as identifiers the parser recognises)
• Docs rewritten to describe what exists (README, EXPLAINME, TOPOLOGY, ROADMAP, architecture, cli-design, 0-AI-MANIFEST); metadata corrected (codemeta.json/CITATION.cff had described an unrelated boilerplate project)
• Justfile rewritten from dune/opam to cargo; Elixir site render helpers restored; guix.scm fixed
• Removed: union-policy-parser (~90% non-compiling scaffolding; preserved in git history), corrupted LICENSE-PMPL-2.0.txt, MVP release tarballs, badge pack, stale signature files, PALIMPSEST-COVENANT.md, docs/mvp-v1.adoc

Verification

cargo build --workspace && cargo test --workspace   # 66 tests
cargo fmt --all -- --check && cargo clippy --workspace --all-targets -- -D warnings
cargo run -- check . --format json | python3 -m json.tool   # deterministic, 0 violations
cargo run -- audit .                                        # 100%, exit 0

The Elixir site is verified by CI (nimble-site.yml) — mix isn't available in this environment.

Out of scope (roadmap)

Action planner / plasma fix, git hooks, and the GitHub Action integration surface are documented in ROADMAP.adoc (v0.3–v0.4), not implemented here.

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