disembark

Disembark is the surface that packs a lifeboat: a portable, highest-fidelity proxy of a project's theory that can be carried across a session, machine, or team boundary.

It takes the source repository as an argument and is read-only and out-of-tree: abcd disembark pack <source-repo> <dest> reads the repository — any repository, including a dead or archived one abcd has never touched — and writes the lifeboat somewhere else. The source tree is never written to, so there is no in-tree lifeboat directory; the record of the run lands in the voyage log at the operator level instead. The destination is guarded by a safety gate: disembark refuses unless it is absent, an empty directory, or one carrying a parseable _provenance.json — it never overwrites a directory abcd did not produce (adr-35, which supersedes adr-4).

abcd disembark probe <source-repo> inspects without writing a lifeboat, reporting coverage: which brief sections the repository can ground, which come back blank, and what was searched. A blank is a first-class result, not a failure. abcd disembark plan <source-repo> likewise writes nothing: it shows the file set a pack would write.

When to use

Use "disembark" when describing the act of packing a lifeboat — the outbound half of the lifeboat lifecycle. It is the counterpart to the /abcd:embark unpack surface's inbound opening; together they bracket the portability boundary. (Do not confuse this with the interview-context embark, the opening move of a grill session — a distinct term in a different bounded context.)

When NOT to use

Do not use "export", "backup", or "snapshot" — these lose the navigational, theory-preserving connotation. Disembark packs the floor the project can carry forward, not a byte-for-byte copy.

Examples

• "The disembark pass distilled the shipped intents and decision timeline into the lifeboat."
• "A disembark probe lists the sources that would be packed, and the sections it could not ground, without writing anything."
• "We disembarked the archived repo to ~/lifeboats/atlas/ — the source was never touched."

Related terms

• record families — the one page that maps the record families and how they relate
• lifeboat — the artefact disembark packs, at a destination outside the source repo
• voyage — the operations namespace at ~/.abcd.noindex/voyage/<source-root-sha>/ that records each disembark run