Defer F16 the way this repository defers things (#742)

[MongLong0214]

The release does not need F16, and #742 must not close for it.

Why not "specified, not shipped"

That would leave exactly what ADR-0027 rejected, in its own Rejected section:

"A deferral is a promise with no date."

A specification living on main is not a date, an owner, or a reopening condition. A closed issue is not a claim anybody can check.

F15's shape instead

The one deferral in this repository that can be audited:

the issue stays open                      #742
the tickets say they are not due          T-1601 … T-1607, unscheduled
two conditions are countable by hand      both start at 0

Neither is instrumented, and that is stated rather than papered over. A counter nobody reads adds a number and changes nothing; a condition written to be countable at least has an answer when somebody asks.

condition	what counts	count
a release goes unnoticed	an operator on another machine, at least two releases behind, who did not know	0
a stale install enforces an older protocol	a repository validating with an older build nobody chose, doctor not run	0

What is deliberately excluded

#433 — the plugin pinned three releases behind — is the strongest evidence available and does not count. It was pinned by a distribution defect, not by somebody not knowing. F16 addresses the second and would not have helped with the first.

Writing that down is what stops it being cited later as occurrence 1, which would fire the condition on a defect this feature does not address.

The support I nearly dropped, and why it is the strongest part

I removed a citation as unsupported: that ADR-0032 forbade doctor from querying the plugin cache. No ADR mentions a plugin cache, so the grep was right — and the claim was still true. It reached me with its subject changed, and I checked the words rather than the claim.

ADR-0032:378-388 says something stronger:

doctor's own process opens no socket — no HTTP client, no update lookup (… we do not ship the lookup at all), no telemetry, on any flag. […] Version skew is checked against local executables, and the #433 class of staleness is a distribution defect whose fix lives in distribution — installSource exists so the report can name which channel to update, not so doctor can go ask the internet.

$ grep -rln '#433' docs/adr/
docs/adr/ADR-0032-doctor-diagnostic-model.md

The only place this repository names the incident, and where doctor declines the job by decision rather than by omission. That is not an argument that F16 is due — this release does not need it — but it is why nothing else will quietly cover the gap while it waits, which is exactly what a written reopening condition is for.

It also does not conflict with leaving #433 out of the counts. The same sentence calls it a distribution defect, which is the reason it is not an operator who did not know. The passage that supports the design refuses it as an occurrence.

Limit

Neither condition can fire on its own. Both need a person to notice and write a comment, so this under-reports rather than being safe.

[github-actions]

CommitLore — record lint

Trailers: clean — 3 commits in origin/main..c87ef2a6df3677fc7792fe1b32dae7e10b1cb500
Active constraints: not read — commitlore: git log --follow accepts exactly one pathspec, so renames are not followed for 2 paths; query one path at a time to follow its rename chain (2 changed paths)

_{Trailer violations fail this check. Active constraints are informational — they are what the repository already decided, not a verdict on this PR.}