Changelog

SOVM/1 carries one revision track. A change is applied to the specification and published as a revision of it, never as a successor document, so there is exactly one place to look for what a revision did: this page. Each entry names a revision, the date it was published, and the substantive changes it carried.

The revision an entry names is the revision the rest of this site is. The identifier is stated once, in the corpus source, and rendered into the pages that quote it — a reader never has to reconcile two spellings of it.

What a revision may move

Section numbers are not stable across revisions. A revision may insert, split, merge or renumber a section, and the number a citation carries then resolves to different text. Conventions is where the citation rule lives: a reference that must survive a revision names its section by name as well as by number, so that the name locates the text when the number no longer does.

This page is the other half of that arrangement. A reader holding a citation against an older revision reads the entries between it and the current one to find out whether the section moved, and whether the move was editorial or substantive.

Revisions

Revision 2

Dated by its sovm-1/r2 tag, cut on main at promotion. Carries one substantive SSP/1 amendment: retirement by succession, a second outcome of revocation beside removal. No section was renumbered, and every new section is a subsection. The wire version is unchanged: the new record is a new registered content type, carried in the existing records member.

• Identity §20.4 adds retired_at_hlc to the trusted-peer keyring row, defines a currently trusted peer and a verification-only row, and states the freeze: once a row is retired, no record of any type is accepted for that site_id.
• Identity §21.2 step 3 requires a currently trusted voucher, and identity §21.3 item 1 excludes a vouch issued by the subject’s immediate predecessor under a succession record.
• Identity §22 distinguishes removal from retirement in step 1 and in the paragraphs that derive step 1’s consequences. The new §22.1 defines the sovm/ssp-succession-v1 record, its verification order, the cutover precondition, the fork rule, and the rule that retirement requires destruction of the predecessor’s key.
• Data model §10, §10.1, §10.2 and §10.3, and semantics §12: a third failure branch above a retirement cutoff, the subkey admission predicate, the subkey’s MUST NOT list, and the retained subkey chain bounded by the cutoff.
• Transport §25 and §29, and the iroh binding §3 and §9: the trust predicates read currently trusted, not retired.
• Limitations §40.8 states the two residuals retirement leaves.
• The registry and SSP/1 §51 register sovm/ssp-succession-v1.

Revision 1

Published 2026-09-03. The first revision of SOVM/1, and the point every later entry on this page is measured from.

A revision versions this document, not the protocol. Revision 1 publishes the working text under an identifier a citation can name, and it changes nothing normative: no requirement was added, removed or re-levelled, no section was renumbered, and no part changed status. A reader holding a citation against the working text as it stood before this entry appeared is holding Revision 1 — nothing has moved, which is why there are no changes listed below this paragraph.

That separation is the whole point of having a revision track. The protocol is promoted by the ten decision gates on status, one at a time and each on its own evidence; none of them has passed, and cutting this revision passed none of them. There is still no released implementation, and nothing on this site describes shipped software. A later revision may carry the first such promotion. This one does not, and Revision 1 must not be read as a claim that it did.

What the revision does buy a reader is a fixed point. Before it there was only “the working text”, which is not something a citation can pin: two readers quoting the specification a month apart could be quoting different sentences with no way to say so. From here on, a citation names a revision, and this page records what moved between one revision and the next.