Provenance
The enum qualifying how we know an edge exists. It is a mandatory attribute of every edge, from a closed set of four values.
| Value | Meaning | Examples |
|---|---|---|
declared | written literally in the source | explicit extends, direct call |
derived | computed by analysis | Go implicit interface satisfaction, TS structural conformance, Python protocols, Rust blanket impls |
dynamic-candidate | dispatch not statically resolvable; targets are guesses | multimethods, PHP __call, duck typing, dyn Trait |
generated | produced by macro/annotation expansion | Rust #[derive], Lombok, Python decorators, Clojure macros |
The order above is the order the header dictionary’s enum declares.
Consequences
Facts and inferences never mix. An analysis that wants facts only filters on declared; that is what --declared-only does on every command that accepts it, and the resulting view is named in the report’s header.
A folded arrow keeps the set. Folding to module or type level aggregates base edges, so a folded arrow carries the sorted set of the provenances underneath it. Renderings collapse that to one bit — an arrow is inferred when any base edge is not declared — and precompute it, so no renderer can get the rule wrong:
| Rendering | Fact | Inference |
|---|---|---|
| DOT, PlantUML | solid edge | dashed edge |
| City arrows | inferred: false | inferred: true |
| Navigator rows | provenance: "declared" | any other value |
Wiring is dynamic-candidate. analyze --report wiring and --framework spring derive dependency-injection edges from written annotations: the container’s choice is not statically resolvable and every candidate is a guess, so the value is dynamic-candidate and the report says so.
Why the distinction is a value on every edge rather than a flag on a report: Facts vs inferences.