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Roadmap

A living, high-level view of what has shipped and what is planned for parrant's metadata-agnostic policy gate and impact analysis. This file was created alongside the config axis; it is intentionally short and curated, not exhaustive — the Changelog is the authoritative per-release record (versions are cut by the maintainer via release.yml, so this page does not pin release numbers).

Shipped

Policy predicate axes

The gate matches a leaf condition on one of these axes (see the policy gate guide):

  • change — facts about the changed column (kind / semantic / breaking / model / column).
  • meta — any dbt meta key on the changed model or column (dotted paths).
  • inferred_meta (shipped) — a meta key resolved by folding UPSTREAM lineage, so a classification declared once (e.g. pii: true on a staging column) is inherited by every downstream column that derives from it, with column-level declassification. Shipped in #119 and renamed inferred → inferred_meta in #120.
  • config (shipped) — each model's resolved dbt node.config (grants.select, materialized, tags, enabled, schema, …) by dotted key, mirroring meta. Set-operator missing paths resolve to the empty set (present, not unknown); scalar missing paths resolve to UNKNOWN (routed to on_missing_meta). This makes "sensitive data must not be granted to a role outside an allowlist" expressible directly via config.grants.select not_subset_of [...], with no manifest-patch bridge — it composes with inferred_meta.pii for the offline PII-exposure rule (example pii_grants_allowlist.yml).
  • reach — a quantified condition over the change's downstream reach (models / columns / exposures), including Metabase dashboards as kind: exposure.
  • structural — booleans the pipeline computes (provable_test_break, touches_exposure, reaches_anything).

Other shipped capabilities

  • Fail-safe three-valued evaluation with independent on_missing_meta / on_error knobs and built-in on_meaning_changed / on_indeterminate semantic-severity defaults.
  • policy init (manifest-introspecting, safe-by-construction scaffold) and policy test (offline backtest with a per-rule fail-safe-UNKNOWN trust column).
  • In-code override pragmas (-- lineage:allow-change / -- lineage:allow-break).
  • Cross-boundary Metabase reach (metabase-extract artifact + offline join).

Next / under consideration

  • Per-commit base-manifest fidelity for policy test — exercise the provable-break and semantic meaning-change block tiers during a backtest (today they need a per-commit before-state; see the fidelity note).
  • External-input release paths — block-until-acknowledged (owner sign-off via a PR label) and block-until-proven (a /data-diff result). Both would require the gate to consume a new external input, cutting against the offline / zero-credential guarantee — noted as possible future work, deliberately unbuilt today.
  • Column-grained config — config is model-grained today (dbt config is a model-level notion); a column-level surface would only follow if a real per-column config need appears.