Draft plugin specification for source adapters, mirroring RFC 001's
role for storage backends. Formalizes the contract six community
ingester PRs (#274, #23, #169, #232, #567, #98, #702) plus #981's
metadata-only mode have been reinventing ad-hoc, so adapter authors
can build to a stable surface.
Key decisions:
- Single ingest() method; lazy adapters yield SourceItemMetadata
ahead of drawers, eager adapters interleave
- Declared-transformation model (§1.4) replaces informal verbatim
promise with a verifiable one; byte_preserving adapters declare
the empty set, declared_lossy adapters enumerate. Existing
miner.py and the convo_miner+normalize pipeline map cleanly
- Palace is the incremental cursor via is_current(item, metadata);
no sidecar persistence
- Routing is adapter-owned; detect_room/detect_hall move into the
filesystem adapter
- Flat metadata per ChromaDB (RFC 001 §1.4) — entity hints as
json_string field, KG triples route to SQLite knowledge graph
- Closets stay core-built as a post-step; adapters may emit flat
closet_hints. Closes existing gap where convo drawers get no
closets
- No per-drawer field renames: source_file, filed_at, source_mtime,
added_by, normalize_version, entities, ingest_mode all preserved.
Spec adds adapter_name, adapter_version, privacy_class
§9 enumerates the cleanup PR prerequisites (mempalace/sources/
module, PalaceContext facade, KnowledgeGraph.add_triple gaining
backwards-compatible source_drawer_id + adapter_name params).
Tracking issue: #989
bensig