[bradygaster]

Part of #2069

Depends on #2074 and targets its branch,
bradygaster-2069-squad-artifact-spec. This PR does not modify or retarget
#2074.

Revision cycle 3 was implemented by unit-contract-tester under the governance
lockout. The original Architect author, cycle-2 author, rejecting reviewers,
and approving Fact Checker did not implement or pair on this revision.

Final revision head and provenance

Final cycle-3 head:
3a7fb5391975486eebc91bfecb5a624f425bbc6d.

The suite source index remains unpublished with
publication.status: working-draft and null publication revision/digest.
published is reserved for a derived immutable release artifact containing an
already-existing reviewed commit SHA and digest.

Cycle-3 blocker closure

• separated publication status from maturity; Charter is now
  executable-normative-draft, Core is
  experimental-normative-draft, and no maturity value contains published
• registered Core consistently as a normative working draft without inventing
  standalone capabilities, conformance classes, or a manifest
• marked Interoperability and Governance sections as executable normative
  schema/test contracts or informative future-profile requirements, removing
  unclaimable conformance language
• distinguished currentRevisionAuthorUid from
  successorRevisionAuthorUid throughout governance prose, schema, fixture,
  and tests
• made governance conditionals accept clean approval and zero-eligible-author
  deadlock while requiring rejection blockers, lockout evidence, and an
  eligible successor; positive and negative mutation cases cover each edge
• replaced the governance example's real PR and reviewer implications with
  synthetic example.invalid and urn:squad:example:* evidence
• corrected Planning to use planning-record identities and future-profile
  language instead of asserting unsupported normativity
• added versioned, section-level Kubernetes, OCI, in-toto, and SLSA precedents;
  GraphQL behavior is explicitly informative and includes a reproducible
  schema-observation query and access date
• added deterministic offline checks for every
  docs/specification/**/*.md local target, local anchor, and absolute HTTPS
  external citation; external network availability remains outside the local
  gate
• added explicit dependency-cycle detection and a cyclic-graph mutation test
• preserved Charter files, portable manifest, exact Charter capability IDs,
  lifecycle/GitHub mappings, and comprehensive export/import coverage

Validation

• npm run build -w packages/squad-sdk && npm run build -w packages/squad-cli
  — passed
• npm run lint — passed
• npx vitest run test/specification-suite.test.ts test/charter-spec.test.ts
  — 35 tests passed
• npm run lint:docs — markdownlint and cspell checked 200 files with 0 issues
• npx eslint test/specification-suite.test.ts — passed
• jq empty for all modified suite JSON/schema fixtures — passed
• git diff --check — passed
• PR diff against bradygaster-2069-squad-artifact-spec — exactly 20 files,
  no deletions

Scope

The PR remains at exactly 20 changed files. Cycle 3 changes 11 existing PR
files only. There are no product-source, dependency, lockfile, changeset, or
file-deletion changes in this PR.

[bradygaster]

Final publication gate: decision required

At 3a7fb5391975486eebc91bfecb5a624f425bbc6d, editorial and adversarial reviews approve, but the API-contract gate still rejects one portable governance defect after the third and final revision cycle.

Blocking contract gap: reviewer independence, successor eligibility, and rejection-to-no-successor-deadlock are not fully expressible in the language-neutral schema/fixtures; some cross-field enforcement exists only in TypeScript.

The exact decision options and evidence are recorded on #2069 under status:needs-decision. No fourth revision will be started without an explicit exception decision.

[bradygaster]

Superseded by the single combined review in #2074 at head 37bdf7a75ecf6e346170a7077cb211697bb93037. The #2078 commits and content were preserved with source provenance in that branch. Closing this PR without merging or retargeting.