Beagle SCM

BEE-022: bee status — the quad over a plain git repo

be's quad (BRO-030, /wiki/Status) says a path's whole story in four chars, one per tree, and bee has no equivalent: bee list shows a 3-char marker over the listed dir only and bee diff is worktree-vs-HEAD. The columns port to a plain git repo, but NOT verbatim — be's patch column is beagle's absorbed theirs, which git spells inside the index instead. RULED: the four columns are UPSTREAM, HEAD, STAGE, WORKTREE, and the quad vocabulary, the commit rows and the paint all carry over unchanged.

Input

Context

bee already answers three of the four columns; the fourth is the one thing it deliberately never read.

• Have: index/refs.js resolves HEAD, loose refs and packed-refs, and knows a linked worktree's commondir.
• Have: the /INDEXES CPAR rows, so ahead/behind is a walk the index answers, no ODB ancestry pass at query time.
• Have: view/diff.js's worktree framing and render/ansi.js slots; dog/git/IGNO.h + quickjab igno.c cover gitignore.
• Missing: the stage column — GIT-032, which this builds on.
• Missing: a status verb; door.js:42:tX VERBS has eight and none of them says what is dirty.

Goals

One view, one row per interesting path, in the be vocabulary and the be paint, over a repo bee did not create.

• The four columns: track = the branch's upstream (branch.<b>.merge), base = HEAD, stage = .git/index, wt = the bytes on disk vs the stage.
• Each column is measured against its NEIGHBOUR, never a root: origin vs HEAD, HEAD vs origin, index vs HEAD, wt vs index.
• Commit rows in the same vocabulary: .o.. ahead, o... behind, read off the CPAR walk the index already serves.
• A CONFLICT is the index's stage 1/2/3 slots at one path, and renders ! in plain, red on a tty — no inference needed.
• Paint via view/quadrender.js's rules: plain keeps the ASCII canon, a tty substitutes glyphs and cell colours per column.
• UNTRACKED rows through igno, so a build tree is not the output; bee http gets the same view through render/html.js.

Constraints

• Read-only and derived, like every other bee verb: no writes to .git, no index refresh, no lock.
• The ASCII canon is the greppable contract — bee status | cat must stay bare .xov, position authoritative.
• No new resolver: the track tip resolves the same way ?<rev> already does, through index/refs.js.
• Detached or no upstream ⇒ origin = HEAD, an all-. column. There is no merge-base and so no unrelated-histories case: two repos that never met simply read every path vv or ox.
• Without GIT-032 the view must still run, with the stage column all-. and said so — not silently wrong.

WIP

Design decisions

• MERGE_HEAD gets NO column (ruling): it lives only between a git merge and the commit ending it, and while it lives the conflict is already spelled by the index's stage slots.
• Staged-ness stops being a STYLE and becomes a COLUMN: be carries it as case/bold on the wt char, bee gives it column 3.
• RULED (gritzko 2026-08-18): the quad is a LADDER, each column read against its neighbour — origin vs HEAD, HEAD vs origin, index vs HEAD, worktree vs index. merge-base leaves the model.
• Columns 1 and 2 are the same comparison from both ends, so the o/x asymmetry is what carries DIRECTION: a path in origin but not HEAD reads o, the reverse reads it in column 2 — exactly how the ahead/behind commit rows already read.
• Cheaper than be's: the index is pre-sorted by path, so the stage column needs no sort; and its stat cache keeps the wt column off the hashing path for every clean file.
• Cheaper: git's own conflict stages beat be's classify-bucket inference — the con flag is read, not deduced.
• Dearer: bee has no classify.js and no mtime index, so the wt column is this view's own work, not a shared service.

TODOs

• [ ] W1: the pure model — four listings into a k-way cursor

  merge, rows + commit rows + counts, no ambient globals

• [ ] W2: the wt axis over igno + the GIT-032 stat cache,

  with the racily-clean rehash

• [ ] W3: the painter and the status verb in door.js VERBS
• [ ] W4: test/status/run.sh — fixtures per column and every

  degenerate root; the http door

• [ ] residue: README.mkd usage list gains a bee status row

Blockers and bummers

• Blocked on GIT-032 for column 3; W1 and the commit rows do not wait on it.

Outcome