Publication Candidate Packet Contract

This contract defines a bounded product-side packet for reviewing a possible publication candidate. It does not create a candidate, select a release, or attest that a transition occurred. A missing, stale, conflicting, or unprovided fact remains unresolved.

Authority boundary

The sealed authority input is sources/authority.json. It records revision 2026-08-08, lists exactly source.naming-decision, source.documentation-boundary, and source.platform-delivery-contract, and sets employee_may_modify to false. The packet records those references without copying private governance material or treating the authority record as approval to publish.

The approved-source boundary in sources/approved/README.md says that logical references and digests belong to the source registry and that missing or stale authority blocks governed delivery. The packet therefore does not fill absent source or evidence details with generated prose.

Evidence and selection boundary

The packet must keep declarations separate from observed evidence. A command allowlist is not proof that a command ran, and product-side validation, reader, or review evidence is not a platform-owned attestation. This step declares no trusted artifact inputs, so candidate identity, comparison basis, reader evidence, independent review evidence, and readiness remain unresolved unless separately supplied by an authoritative handoff.

Candidate-only boundary

The packet remains candidate-only. It does not authorize or infer approval, promotion, publication, scheduling, rollback, release-pointer changes, or a live-directory write. The repair is limited to this packet's content, contract, page registry entry, model, and journey manifest; the sealed sources/ authority remains read-only.

Acceptance checks

• AC-1 — Sealed authority trace: The reader can identify the authority path, revision, exact three source IDs, and employee_may_modify: false without copying private governance material or modifying the authority.
• AC-2 — Bounded evidence and selection: The reader can distinguish declared evidence requirements from observed evidence and leaves candidate selection unresolved when the required candidate, validation, reader, or review artifacts are not supplied.
• AC-3 — Candidate-only handoff: The reader can state that this packet is product-side review material only and does not authorize or infer approval, promotion, publication, scheduling, rollback, release-pointer changes, or a live-directory write.