0007: Resolve Competing Gate Evidence Explicitly

Status: Superseded by ADR 0028

This decision remains historical evidence of a coherent but disproportionate receipt-conflict design. Its interfaces are no longer active STAGE guidance.

Context

Solo Unity profile checks produce immutable, revision-bound receipts. A later human re-review or live-operation rerun can therefore leave more than one valid receipt for the same dependency and completion gate. Treating the newest file, latest timestamp, last CLI argument, or most favorable outcome as authoritative would hide contradictory evidence and make assessment results depend on incidental ordering.

Deleting or rewriting the older receipt would also destroy the audit trail. STAGE needs a way to distinguish deliberate evidence replacement from an unresolved contradiction without allowing an agent to infer the owner's intent.

Decision

• Keep every finalized human-acceptance and operational-proof receipt immutable.
• Treat multiple current valid receipts for one dependency and gate as a conflict by default.
• Resolve a conflict only through a separate, human-attested gate-evidence resolution receipt.
• Bind each resolution to the exact clean project revision, profile catalog, dependency, gate, and complete set of competing receipt paths and SHA-256 digests.
• Require the resolution to select exactly one candidate and identify every other candidate as superseded for that assessment context.
• Reject a resolution when a candidate is missing, altered, duplicated, no longer valid, or when an additional current candidate is supplied. A changed candidate set requires a new resolution.
• Preserve the selected receipt's actual outcome. Selecting rejected, deferred, failed, or inconclusive evidence does not promote it to acceptance or success.
• Never infer precedence from timestamps, filenames, argument order, author or operator identity, or favorable outcome.
• Keep resolution artifacts outside the inspected Unity project and create them exclusively rather than overwriting prior records.
• Treat multiple current resolution receipts for the same dependency and gate as another explicit conflict unless they are reduced to one deliberate input.

Consequences

• Re-review is possible without erasing history or silently changing policy.
• Assessment remains deterministic for the same complete evidence set.
• The owner must make one additional explicit decision when valid receipts overlap.
• A new receipt intentionally reopens resolution instead of being silently ignored by an older selection.
• Resolution proves evidence selection and record integrity, not the underlying human observation or live operation; those claims remain bounded by the selected receipt.