# Stemma changelog — what shipped, and when *Every release of Stemma since 4 May 2026. Releases, not commits, and the repairs alongside the additions.* - Author: Bartosz Frąckowiak - Canonical: https://bfrackowiak.pl/stemma/changelog/ - Project page: https://bfrackowiak.pl/stemma/ - Repository: https://github.com/batas2/Stemma - Licence: PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0 - Status: side project, built on evenings and weekends since 4 May 2026 Dates are when the work landed in the repository, not when it was announced — there is nothing here to announce it to. Anything described as shipped has a feature record and, where it touches the engine, round-trip fixtures behind it. --- ## 2026-08-08 — The headless half Everything Stemma could do, it could only do with a mouse in it. This release is the other authoring surface: a model written as text, rendered by a command, and checked by a build that has never opened the app. - **`stemma render`** — a workspace and a view become an image, with no browser of your own open and no mouse. It runs a short-lived backend of its own, so two renders can run at once and neither disturbs a workspace you have open. - **A publication profile** — outline boxes, no kind chip, no icon, no shadow, no background grid, no status badge. Transparent by default; scale, padding and palette are options. Rendering for a screen and rendering for a page are different jobs, and Stemma only had the first. - **Layout as a constraint** — `grid`, `row`, `column` and `stack`, solved to coordinates. A view can now say *two columns, these four, 56 apart* instead of carrying the residue of somebody's mouse. A later drag records an offset against the constraint rather than replacing it, so the arrangement survives being corrected. Authorable as text, or from the canvas selection. - **`stemma validate`** — ids are strings and nothing checks them: a typo produces a missing node or a missing arrow, silently. This reports dangling endpoints, view members that do not exist, links with one end outside the view, and a warning past seven boxes. `--json` for something acting on the answer rather than reading it. - **A render manifest, and `--check`** — every render writes a sibling manifest fingerprinting the model, the view, the layout and the profile it was drawn from. `--check` re-computes it and exits non-zero when a committed image has stopped matching its source — the drift guarantee, extended past the app window. - **True vector SVG** — the publication profile emits SVG primitives out of the same component tree the canvas renders, instead of wrapping serialised HTML in a `foreignObject`. The old export opened in Chrome and essentially nowhere else. - **`Concept` and `Relation`** — a box that asserts nothing about a system, and an arrow that claims nothing beyond its label. Drawing an argument previously meant declaring something like "what the repository can answer" as a bounded context, which compiles, validates, and is false. - **A published schema, and a protocol reference** — `stemma.layout.json` has a JSON Schema, and every sidecar now carries a pointer to it. The protocol document explains the whole chain to someone who will never open the app, with three worked examples that were built and rendered exactly as written. - **Diagnostics** — a leveled, structured record of what the engine did, as JSON lines under `~/.stemma/logs/`, capped and rotated without being asked. Shareable bundles are redacted by default. There is no network sink and none can be configured: a log record contains element names, ownership and sometimes your source. - **Fixed: the sidecar stopped dropping what it did not model** — free-form shapes and edge dock handles were discarded on their way to disk, so both survived only until reload. Unknown sections now round-trip verbatim. - **Fixed: node titles wrap** — they clipped at around thirty characters, which was quietly shaping what things could be called. - **Fixed: the draw.io export became usable** — it ignored the view and the layout and emitted the whole model on a grid in default pastel. It now honours both. Six further defects, found by auditing the render pipeline end to end, went with it. ## 2026-08-03 — In the open The repository, a licence, and two workspaces worth reading before writing your own. - **`github.com/batas2/Stemma`** — source-available, with the engine and the round-trip fidelity suite in it. - **PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0** — free for personal use, study, hobby projects, and for charities, educational institutions, public research bodies and government. Commercial use of any kind needs a licence. - **Aurora Rail** — the reference workspace: a fictional rail-ticketing platform with 66 elements, four saved views and three narrative books, exercising every part of the DSL. - **Stemma's own architecture, as a Stemma workspace** — the tool modelling itself, which is the cheapest honest test of whether the vocabulary is sufficient. ## 2026-08-01 — Stemma, and a workspace with no solution in it A rename, and the removal of the largest thing standing between somebody and their first model. - **Renamed from Verso** — a *stemma codicum* is the family tree philologists draw for a manuscript: every surviving copy traced back to one archetype. That is the shape of the thing. - **Model-only workspaces** — a folder holding `Architecture/` and nothing else opens with no MSBuild, no SDK, no restore and no NuGet. Until this, the first step was owning a .NET solution. - **From scratch** — start a model by name; the empty canvas says what to do next instead of sitting there. - **A desktop shell, decided** — Photino, with a window flag and a renderer benchmark behind the choice. ## 2026-06-10 — The report An answer to the question every modelling tool eventually meets: how do I show this to somebody who will never install it? - **A single-file interactive HTML report** — one file. It opens offline, with no server, no login and no seat. Audience modes (builder, stakeholder, reviewer), per-view layer toggles, element search, and element-anchored comments that export as a pack and import back into the workspace. Styled to match the canvas it came from. - **Inline edge editing** — a unified properties blade, sticky inspector tabs, and a floating direction toolbar on a selected relationship. - **Keyboard shortcuts** — delete, rename, zoom, view switching, selection. - **Fixed: dependency links appeared on the module map** — they were being computed and not drawn. Default-coloured arrowheads were invisible against the canvas, too. ## 2026-06-08 — Docking, routing, and the rail The month the canvas stopped feeling like a prototype. - **draw.io-style edge docking** — relationships anchor to connection dots on a node and reconnect to another box. - **Four routing modes** — curved, elbow, step and straight, with per-end markers and predefined relationship types that carry their own styling. - **The inspector became an icon rail** — one panel at a time (properties, appearance, text, lifecycle, ownership, custom properties, comments, layout), plus a full-screen rich editor for notes. - **Per-view layout modes** — organic, hierarchical, by-type and custom, each tunable and remembered for the view it belongs to. - **`.doc/` became the single source of truth** — product, architecture, UX and UI as four pillars, with the pre-refactor specs archived rather than left to rot beside them. ## 2026-05-19 — Books, and a second adapter Modelling a system is half the job. This is the half about getting a room to agree. - **Story books** — ordered, audience-tagged sequences of pages, each naming a view and carrying the narrative you would actually say out loud. Present mode drives the canvas from the page; the whole thing exports as a multi-page PDF. - **A YAML adapter that preserves trivia** — comments and formatting survive a write, which is the same rule the C# writer follows and the reason either one can be trusted. - **Free-form shapes and a comments sidecar** — ink that carries no architectural meaning, kept out of the model on purpose. - **Data-layer kinds, and two more built-in views** — a data model and a resource tree, alongside the module map and the dependency graph. ## 2026-05-04 — The first workspace Five spikes in a day, answering one question: can the C# on disk be the model database, rather than an export of it? - **C# source as storage** — the model read off the syntax tree by name, and written back through Roslyn — the foundation everything since has rested on. - **The canvas** — a drag-and-drop palette, custom views stored as code, two auto-arrange algorithms, snapping, alignment and multi-select. - **The layout sidecar** — positions and styling committed beside the model, so presentation never enters it. - **Lifecycle, undo, and a file watcher** — plus a validation engine with fixtures, and export to PNG, SVG and draw.io. --- ## Related - [The Stemma project page](https://bfrackowiak.pl/stemma/) — what it is, the vocabulary, the agentic pipeline, the specifications and the roadmap. Plain text at https://bfrackowiak.pl/stemma/index.md - [The Diagram That Cannot Lie](https://bfrackowiak.pl/blog/the-diagram-that-cannot-lie/) — the argument the tool is built on.