Explanation¶
Background and reasoning: why the framework is shaped this way, what each piece is for, and which trade-offs were taken deliberately. Read it when you want to understand rather than to do.
Two subsections¶
- Concepts — ideas that cut across crates: the
Appcontext, layered configuration, error diagnostics, MCP exposure, and why a flag and a setting are different things. - Components — what each
rtb-*crate is for and how it fits, with a pointer to that module's own microsite for its full API.
Why these sit under explanation¶
Both used to be top-level directories. They are not separate Diátaxis quadrants — a concept page and a component overview are both explanation, so they are filed as subsections of it. The old URLs redirect.
Anything that is "what is this flag, what does it default to" moved the other way, into Reference, where it can be looked up rather than read.
Reasoning lives here, not in a spec¶
Where a page defers its reasoning to a specification number, that reasoning is — as far as the documentation is concerned — missing. Specs are point-in-time design records, they are moving to the project wiki, and they are not documentation. Pages in this section are being rewritten to state the argument in their own words; a remaining "see spec NNNN" marks a page that has not had that pass yet.
Related¶
- What RTB is and is not — the scope statement.
- What RTB does not do — the same boundary from the other side, at flag level.