§4 How a decision is made and recorded
Who decides: the maintainers named under .github/CODEOWNERS — today, one person. When §2 adds maintainers, normative decisions (§3.1) are made by that group under whatever quorum or consensus rule a future revision of this document states; none is stated today because there is no group to state it for.
Where it is recorded, for every decision:
| Record | What it captures |
|---|---|
| The ADR's Status line | The decision itself: accepted, rejected, or superseded, and when |
The release's RELEASE.md checklist | Whether the decision has been carried out — encoded, fixtured, evidenced — as a named, checkable row |
CHANGELOG.md | What actually shipped, at which artifact release |
COMPATIBILITY.md | The record-level effect of the decision, classified |
A decision is not "made" by an issue thread reaching agreement, or by code merging that assumes an answer (§3.1). It is made when an ADR's Status says Accepted, and not before.
Ratification votes — the items a draft's RELEASE.md lists under "Open votes" (for example, rows 18–19 of `standards/ver/1.1-draft/RELEASE.md`) — are decided the same way: in the open, by an ADR recording the question, the options, and the decision, before the checklist row is marked resolved. The same holds for a narrowing taken under VERSIONING.md §2.3's evident-intent carve-out, whose condition 3 requires that "the narrowing is carried as a named item on the ratification checklist, voted on explicitly, and recorded in COMPATIBILITY.md" — that vote is a decision under this section, not a formality separate from it.