PlayTime at the shell boundary

Write this so someone with no background can follow.

What do I need?

Curiosity about where a "play the document" engine belongs. You do not need to install Scriptbook to read this.

The cousin

OpenShellOrg cares what happens at argv[0]. Entrypoint Dispatch: the process you launched should be the right host and version, or it should stop. SOS: flags should not lie. Structured pipelines: stdout should not have to be both a pipe and a canvas.

PlayTime is a Dev-Centr engine that plays a CentrMark playbook. It detects the host, asks Equivalence Engine to bind an intent to a command, and spawns argv with no shell unless the catalog row is honestly a script.

That last sentence is a shell-boundary sentence.

CentrMark book, PlayTime stage, Scriptbook app
Figure 1. Cookbook, kitchen, waiter — the kitchen is the boundary

Why it sounds like us

OpenShellOrg concern PlayTime rhyme

Do not wrap a program in a lying shell string

Install methods are argv. No bash coat, no pwsh coat.

Host / version honesty at the process boundary

Host Awareness snapshot before any catalog lookup

Do not invent a new shell language

Glue may be Nushell. Intents are not a dialect translator.

Standards and small engines, not a mega-orchestrator

PlayTime must not own package catalogs or a GUI
argv box; dashed shell coats are not needed
Figure 2. One suitcase, no costumes

A questionnaire that asks "MSI or bash?" collapses a package format and a parser into one hallway. We refuse that here too. See Argv as execution currency.

Why it is not here yet

Dev-Centr owns the practitioner document: Scriptbook the app, the .cmk playbook, the sidecar weave, the DevCentr GUI later. Equivalence Engine owns the catalog of intents. PlayTime is the kitchen between those two.

Moving the kitchen while dinner is on the stove would split the build. The library is scriptbook today. The binary stays scriptbook. Spec says do not fork a repo yet.

PlayTime in the Dev-Centr workshop; dotted maybe-later path to OpenShellOrg
Figure 3. Aligned, not moved

Rule of thumb, same as division of labor:

  • "What should my team run?" — Dev-Centr (the book, the waiter, the catalog of tools).

  • "What should a runner believe about argv and host identity?" — OpenShellOrg-shaped. Cross-link. Do not duplicate the engine.

If PlayTime ever moves, Host Awareness and argv-spawn should move with it. Equivalence Engine catalogs and the Scriptbook GUI should not.

What to read