FlowDrop Workflow Specification 1.0-draft

An expired outward interrupt ends the run it was holding open

An outward interrupt is the only thing that can resume the run that raised it. Once it expires the resume key is gone, and without this rule the run would sit paused forever: never terminal, never announced, invisible to everything that reports on finished runs.

The rule

Normative: this is the rule
  1. When an outward interrupt expires, the run that raised it is ended: its still-active jobs are cancelled, the run is marked cancelled, and the outcome is announced like any other terminal outcome (ORC-15).
  2. Two exclusions bind.
  3. An expiring inward signal must not end a run: it acts on a run it does not own, and a lapsed cancel or pause request is a request that went unanswered, not a run that ended.
  4. A run that has already recorded an outcome keeps it: a late expiry never overwrites it and never announces a second time.
  5. A failure while ending one run is recorded and never raised, so a sweep is not aborted mid-backlog.
  6. An interrupt with no expiry (INT-23) is never swept and never reaches this path, so an open-ended question to a human waits indefinitely; a confirmation gate interrupt is the deliberate exception, always carrying an expiry (RT-GATE-1), so an abandoned gated run ends here instead of holding an inbox entry forever.
Rule identifiers are permanent and are never renumbered. Each implementation publishes its own standing against these rules; this specification does not.spec 1.0-draft · INT-18 · changed in spec 1.0