Version Control and Provenance

Every published number can be traced to the code version and inputs that produced it, and revisions become new versions rather than silent edits.

Knowing where a number came from

Provenance is the ability to answer, for any published figure, exactly which code and which inputs produced it. Kronos keeps its analysis under version control and ties each deposit to a specific state of that history, so a claim in a paper can be traced back to the commit and parameters behind it. Without provenance, an open dataset is a pile of files; with it, the dataset is auditable.

Revisions are versions, not overwrites

• When a result changes, a new deposit version is published with its own DOI, while the old version remains reachable; the breeder paper carries a version two.
• The frozen design point is versioned, so 'the numbers' always refers to a specific, dated set; see frozen-design discipline.
• Retired identifiers are marked retired, not deleted, so old references still resolve; see the DOI map.

Why never overwrite

Silently editing a published number in place is the quiet way records lose their integrity: a reader who cited the old value can no longer tell what changed. Publishing a new version instead keeps the full history honest and lets anyone diff what moved and why. It is the same discipline as pre-registration — the past record is fixed.

Provenance across the whole corpus

Because the technical library and figures are generated from source modules against the frozen canon, provenance extends beyond the deposits to the public pages themselves: regenerate from the same source and canon, and you get the same output. This is what lets the reproducible pipelines and the verify function actually work.

Every published number has an address in our history. Nothing important is edited without leaving a trace.