mant-loader

Read-only local document discovery and bounded acquisition for ManT. The loader resolves logical document names, explicitly supplied files and typed linked document scopes into owned mant-ir content. It uses mant-codec for decoding and mant-sources for installed Markdown registration; it does not execute semantic queries, render reports or update sources.

Features

The default feature set supports Markdown and installed tldr caches without libmandoc or a C compiler. Enable roff to load native manuals, including bounded gzip/zstd decompression and indexed .so redirects. Manual catalog discovery itself does not require a parser. A missing native capability is not permission to invoke a host formatter, download content or run an updater.

Loading and ownership

DocumentLoader captures the host manual roots and lazily builds registered Markdown, native-manual and unified-catalog snapshots. Reuse the same loader when discovery and loading must share precedence; construct another to refresh local discovery. Snapshot reuse does not freeze external file contents or make the filesystem transactional.

For an on-demand host, prepare PreparedCatalogQuery before constructing the loader. It validates filters and compiles the matcher without discovery; DocumentLoader::discover_prepared then reuses that matcher and the loader's snapshot. Applying a prepared query to an already materialized catalog also performs no IO. Neither preparation nor reuse refreshes the host environment.

LoadSpec borrows an explicit logical selector or input path. It carries no serialized query schema, search expression, output format or query view. Loading errors are separate from the application's view-validation errors. Only the composition layer accepts a complete request and joins loading with semantic query execution.

use mant_loader::{DocumentLoader, LoadSpec, LoadPolicy};
use mant_protocol::InputFormat;

let loader = DocumentLoader::from_system();
let content = loader.load(
    LoadSpec::File { path: "notes.md", format: InputFormat::Markdown },
    LoadPolicy::Combined,
)?;
assert!(content.document.is_some());
# Ok::<(), Box<dyn std::error::Error>>(())

Boundaries

• Registered documents and native manuals retain deterministic source priority, exact logical identities and explicit ambiguity. A failed logical selector never becomes a physical path.
• Direct inputs are separately authorized by their caller. Source-byte and decoded-byte limits are enforced while reading, not inferred from file size.
• Linked-document loading is bounded, breadth-first and source ordered. A single admission operation commits content, graph positions, traversal work and byte accounting together; failed candidates do not consume a document slot or leave half a graph node.
• Negative resolution caching is request-local and qualified by policy, source and manual section. A frontier is a coverage boundary, not proof that a document does not exist.
• Tldr cache discovery may inspect executable availability but never starts a program. Cache updates and host process execution belong to the application.

The source, configuration and metadata safety contracts are documented in the architecture and sources guide. ManT-authored code is Apache-2.0; optional native parsing remains in the separately licensed and attributed libmandoc-rs package.