Status of this guide

This guide is informative documentation. It issues no requirements of its own.

docs/AFDS-SPECIFICATION.md, AFDS specification, version 1.0.0, is the normative source of truth for all four of its Parts. Where this guide and the specification disagree, the specification wins and the disagreement is a defect in this guide.

Every statement of obligation here carries the clause it comes from, so that a reader can always get from an instruction in the guide to the normative text behind it.

The project's research notes, its colophon of decisions and its register of open questions are not part of the specification and are not authority for what conforms. Clause 1.4 places them: they record how the decisions here were reached, which were rejected, and what remains unsettled. Read them for why a requirement exists.

This guide replaces an earlier version written before the specification was completed. Where the earlier text said something the specification now contradicts, the correction is noted in place rather than made silently.