Checking a record without installing this

It is the claim the README opens on, so here is the command behind it. packages/chain/FORMAT.md specifies the bytes (canonicalization, the entry hash, the content root, the signed checkpoint) and packages/chain/verifier/ is a verifier written from that document in dependency-free Python, importing nothing of the product it checks:

git clone https://github.com/felipesauer/mnema
python3 mnema/packages/chain/verifier/mnema_verify.py record /path/to/a/repo/.mnema
#> checks: 12 ok, 0 FAIL, 0 UNCHECKED, 5 note
#> VERDICT: VERIFIED

The last argument is a path you supply: the .mnema/ directory of the repository you are checking, which any repository that has run mnema init carries at its root. The clone gives you the verifier, not a record to point it at, so running that second line with the placeholder still in it prints THE VERIFIER BROKE: there is no record at … and exits 3, which is the verifier being right about a path with nothing behind it rather than about your record.

Python 3.9 or later, no third-party packages, nothing to install: Ed25519 is RFC 8032 by hand, checked against the RFC’s own vectors. It reproduces the published canonical vectors, refuses all but five of the mutations in its own mutate.py (three both readers accept and two it reads as incomplete; its README says which), and prints what it does not check before it prints a verdict. Writing it found twenty-seven points where the specification was not enough to work from, and those are the deliverable half of it: mnema_verify.py gaps lists them.

It judges the workflows too. FORMAT.md §6.7 makes the moves a decision, a task, a skill and a run may make part of the format, and the second reader reads the tables from the same event-schema.json, judges every move where the merged order puts it, and names a move they do not allow with the rule it broke: as this product’s verify does in its census, and at the same place. A retraction of a note or a link by an identity that did not write it (§6.4) is named the same way, and so is every writing of a decision that is not its text (§6.8). None is a break: the two verdicts agree on such a record (both verify it) and both say which fact is not applied. A copy of either reader from before §6.7 applies every move and names none.

What a second reader does not buy is worth saying here too: it is independent in the technical sense (another language, written from the document, sharing no code) and not in the social one, being the same author and the same repository.