Graphshell

Graphshell is the host layer of the Mere family as a library: the contract between an application that shows other applications (a host) and an application that can be shown (a guest), and above it the toolkit a host is built from. Mere is the engine underneath; applications such as Turnstone sit on top.

The repository has two Cargo workspace roots, each with its own lock.

The contract root (crates/)

The bottom of the stack. Nothing in it depends on Mere, in normal, build or dev dependencies; grep -c 'merely-made/mere' Cargo.lock prints 0.

Crate	Role
chirograph	The projection contract: versioned, carrier-neutral messages by which an endpoint offers a scene, a resource or an action and a host asks for one
sceno	Scene vocabulary: source references, spaces, footprints, persisted scores, scene instances
sceno-backdrops	Backdrop scenes (metre, fretboard, terrain, templated sequences) compiled to sceno scenes
scenotime	Scene runtime: epochs, idempotent diffs, host-clocked transitions, picking
hest	Shared command menus, palette sessions and command ids
graphshell-endpoint	The traits an application implements beside its own truth, the stdio, local and network carriers, and the WIT projection session
graphshell-client	Transport-independent client state: snapshots, diffs, resume, resource cache
script-wire	wRPC value encoding and blocking transports for the WIT bindings
script-witgen	Generates Rust bindings for a WIT interface over script-wire; a build dependency
tinct	Perceptual (OKLCH) seed-to-palette derivation and a contrast-gated syntax palette
vector-sheet	The versioned vector sheet a guest block returns for its host to paint

The WIT world is crates/graphshell-endpoint/wit/world.wit (package mere:script@0.1.0). It is the only copy; graphshell-endpoint publishes its directory to dependents' build scripts through Cargo links metadata (DEP_GRAPHSHELL_ENDPOINT_WIT).

The host root (host/)

The host toolkit and the resident assembly. The crates keep the subpaths they had in Mere. The root names the contract crates by path (../crates/<name>), the engine's five crates (mere-kernel, mere-rdf, catchment, pandect, mere-facts) from mere.git, pictograph and emblem from emblem.git, and Distillery's crates from distillery.git; nothing else comes from mere.git.

Path	Crates
crates/cambium/	cambium, meristem, sprigging, backstep, workbench, mandrake, cambium-rootstock, cambium-desktop, cambium-web, cambium-winit, cambium-a11y, mere-view, mere-overmap; scenes/scenograph and scenes/scenomise
crates/canvas/cartography	mere-cartography, the canvas, with the backdrop studies it ships (backdrops/)
crates/forme/uxtree	uxtree
crates/graphshell/	graphshell-door, graphshell-host, graphshell-client-tests
crates/incipit, crates/platen/platen	incipit, platen
crates/script/	app-host, authority-host, block-host, block-adapter, document-host: the component hosts over the WIT world; their test guests build for wasm32-wasip2
crates/system/	djinn-testkit, mere-fetch, mere-registry, settings-wit, mere-surface-api, tabard, ux-events
ports/mere-resident	mere-resident, the resident assembly
ports/moot	mere-moot
ports/pelt/core, ports/pelt/desktop, ports/tabard/workshop	pelt-core, pelt-desktop, tabard-workshop

Beside the members: support/patches/ holds the patched light-file-dialog and cubek-matmul that the root's [patch.crates-io] table points at, support/run_resident_*.ps1 drive resident receipt runs, and testing/moot-ocapn-coop is a standalone check of mere-moot's co-op sources with its own lock.

For other repositories' tests, block-host exposes its fixture guest under its test-support feature (block_host::test_support::fixture_guest_wasm()), and mere-resident exports the identity-cards projection under test-fixtures.

Depending on it

Family repositories name these crates by git, on main, with no revision pin:

cambium = { git = "https://github.com/merely-made/graphshell.git", branch = "main" }

Cargo finds a package by its name anywhere in the repository, in either root; the consumer's lock records the revision.

Building

The toolchain is pinned in rust-toolchain.toml, with the wasm32-unknown-unknown and wasm32-wasip2 targets.

cargo test --workspace --locked
cargo check --workspace --all-targets --locked --manifest-path host/Cargo.toml

The hooks in .pre-commit-config.yaml (run with prek) are line-ceiling, responsa, clippy on both roots, clippy with mere-view's query feature, and cargo deny's bans check on host/ with deny.toml.

What is not here

The engine (Mere's five crates) is in mere.git. The reference application (ports/graphshell, with graphshell-mere, graphshell-blocks, graphshell-dramatis-pane and graphshell-mcp) is in Turnstone. pictograph is in emblem, and athanor (mere-athanor) is in Distillery.

History

The crates carry their Mere history: each was exported from Mere and merged in. The toolkit under host/ was imported from mere.git 325b0083b with every file's former paths, so git log --follow on a moved file reaches back past its renames in Mere. The contract crates came earlier:

Here	In Mere before the move
crates/chirograph	crates/chirograph
crates/sceno	crates/cambium/scenes/sceno
crates/scenotime	crates/cambium/scenes/scenotime
crates/hest	crates/cambium/hest
crates/graphshell-endpoint	crates/graphshell/graphshell-endpoint (without src/door/)
crates/graphshell-endpoint/wit/world.wit	crates/script/wit/world.wit
crates/graphshell-client	crates/graphshell/graphshell-client
crates/script-wire	crates/script/wire
crates/script-witgen	crates/script/witgen
crates/tinct	crates/cambium/tinct (copied byte for byte from Mere 9e790a152, without history)
crates/sceno-backdrops	scenomise::backdrops and scenomise::template

What this repository held before 2026-11-06 is recorded in the cut-over record; the older content is in git history and on the repository's other branches. Design documents are in design_docs/, indexed by design_docs/DOC_README.md.

Licence

MPL-2.0, see LICENSE. The sources carry the MPL-2.0 header and SPDX tag, except crates/hest, whose sources came without headers and are covered by the manifest's license = "MPL-2.0"; the golden file crates/script-wire/tests/generated/conformance.rs is generated and compared byte for byte with script-witgen's output.