Frontier VOI Governance

This is the authoritative architecture and governance reference for frontier VOI, Rust-core, HPC, and registry follow-through tracks. The machine-readable companion is voiage/governance.py, enforced by tests/test_frontier_governance.py.

Maturity taxonomy

Every frontier family has exactly one promotion label: planned, experimental, fixture-backed, or stable. Stable promotion requires cross-language parity, Rust-kernel parity where applicable, complete documentation, changelog and migration entries, approval evidence, and public API compatibility evidence. The promotion matrix and checklist under specs/frontier/governance/ are normative.

Backend boundary and dependencies

Backend selection belongs in backends; VOI semantics belong in methods. The base install stays lightweight, while JAX, PyTorch, and CuPy remain optional extras. Experimental interfaces cannot authorize stable claims until their fixtures, schemas, and parity gates are complete.

Execution order

Downstream tracks proceed through governance, dataset and example evidence, Rust frontier migration, frontier promotion, and external registry/HPC evidence. There are no conflicts between these governance decisions and the existing fixture registry. A false stable_claim_allowed value is intentional evidence that a family is not yet stable.