D188 — Retired without ever being written

Status: retired (2026-09-10). Never implemented, never specified.

D188 was reserved by a plan issue that was never filed. The audit that produced D185–D193 yielded eight plan issues (#240–#247) and skipped this number; five of them named D188 in their "Cross-plan order" section as a security prerequisite landing first, and four declared themselves blocked on it. There is no issue, no entry in any topic register, and no branch — nothing anywhere states what it was meant to contain.

Decision. The number is retired, not reused. Nothing may be filed as D188.

Rationale. Two things had to be true and only one of them could be arranged.

The dangling prerequisite had to go: four approved plans were blocked on a document that does not exist and could never be produced, so the references were removed from #243, #244, #245, #246 and #247, each with a note recording why. That unblocked the wave.

Reusing the free number for the next decision was the obvious tidy-up and is rejected. Five issue bodies, now part of the repository's history, discuss "D188" as a security item that lands first. A future D188 about something else would make those five paragraphs read as a description of it, and the reader would have no way to tell. A hole in the sequence is a smaller defect than a number meaning two things — and this project has just paid for the second kind: D185 was claimed by both a plan issue and a pull request, and the collision had to be resolved by renumbering after the fact.

Consequences. The register skips from D187 to D189, deliberately. If the security concern the audit had in mind resurfaces, it is filed under a new number with its own plan issue; it does not inherit this one.