Evidence schema, retention, and publication governance

Generation contract

The generator validates every source record against the versioned JSON Schema and controlled category, status, environment, owner, and retention registries. It rejects unknown fields, protected field names, credential-like text, unresolved supersession targets, cycles, unsafe tombstones, missing reason categories, and incomplete approval timestamps.

Keys and records are canonically sorted. The generated catalog and manifest are committed; test:evidence-center regenerates their expected bytes in memory and fails when either output is stale. The manifest records every record-version digest, the catalog digest, and a count for every status, including zero.

Retention and removal

Class	Public behavior
current-operational	Retain current state and enough explicit superseded history to interpret it.
release-lifetime	Retain through supported life and the approved post-support period.
public-governance	Keep durable decisions and approvals; corrections append or supersede.
transient-validation	Keep the summary while bulky CI artifacts may expire.
incident-audit	Publish only an authorized safe disclosure; protected retention is separate.

Expiry changes status rather than silently deleting a referenced record. Before removal, the Evidence Owner checks inbound claim links, supported versions, holds, supersession, and review dates. Deletion that would break a retained relationship is rejected. A safe tombstone is required when the stable public identity must remain.

Protected review

Redaction is an independently reviewed transformation into the allowlisted public schema, not denylist scrubbing of a raw artifact. The public repository contains no protected source location. Approval identifies only the authorized reviewer role, time, exact public record, and record digest.

Rollback

The implementation is additive. Rollback removes the Evidence Center routes, generator command, schema, registry, normalized record set, and generated catalog/manifest together. Existing evidence/ files retain their original meaning and are not rewritten or deleted.