Track letter W is claimed by TWO lanes — Windows and Website

• Type: meta (board hygiene / coordination hazard)
• Track: A (the board belongs to A/B)
• Status: done
• Owner: —

W currently means two different things, and the two halves hid from each other because they are spelled differently — which is why this went unnoticed:

A grep "^track: W" finds only Windows. A prose search finds only Website. Neither search shows the conflict.

Recommendation: Website keeps W; Windows was never a lane

Website has the stronger claim, and it is documented. [[feature-web-track-w-bootstrap]] (2026-07-12, user + agent) argues the letter explicitly against CLAUDE.md's "don't invent letters" rule and passes that rule's own test: the bar is a genuinely new place code lives, and the website is a separate private repo. Precedent cited there: Track T's watcher runs in its own clone and is still a track. That reasoning stands.

Windows does not meet the same bar. There is no "why a new letter" note for it anywhere, and it is not a place code lives — it is a campaign spread across existing lanes:

• feature-port-windows-pe (PE/COFF writer, MS x64 ABI) → Track A
• feature-pcl-win32-widgetset, feature-pcl-tk-windows-compat → Track B
• feature-t-windows-wine-harness → Track T

That is precisely the shape of S (eSpressif/SoC): a work-tag surfaced as a visible campaign, file-owned per ticket by A/B/T and gated by that lane. Windows should be the same. If it wants a visible letter, it needs a free one and a recorded rationale — not W.

Concrete proposal (user, 2026-08-08): M = MSWindows, as a TAG. M is genuinely free — verified against BOTH declaration conventions, which is the check that would have caught this collision in the first place. Claimed today: A B C D E N O P S T U W Z. Free: F G H I K L M Q V Y. (R is declared in CLAUDE.md but carried by no ticket; the Rust work sits in experimental/, which is unranked by design.)

The tag rule applies exactly as it does to O and S: an M ticket ALSO carries its Track A / B / T file-ownership for collision purposes and obeys that lane's gate. *-windows-* / *-win32-* / *-wine-* slugs would auto-tag M, same as *-esp-* does for S. Retagging the four is then a frontmatter edit plus a CLAUDE.md entry, not a reorganisation.

Second finding: progress.sh knows NEITHER

--track: invalid choice: 'W' (choose from A,B,C,D,E,N,O,P,R,S,T,U,Z)

So the four Windows tickets carry a frontmatter track the ranker does not recognise, and the website tickets were never in the frontmatter system at all. Both sets are effectively invisible to next/ready. Whatever letters survive must be added to the tool, or the tickets do not exist as far as the queue is concerned — which is likely why nobody hit the collision by working on it.

Third finding: two conventions for declaring a track

Frontmatter track: versus a - **Track:** body line. The ranker reads the first; humans write either. That is what let the collision hide, and it will hide the next one too. Pick one (frontmatter, since it is machine-read) and have progress.sh check flag a ticket that declares a track only in prose.

The retag also has to fix CROSS-REFERENCES

Retagging the four Windows tickets is not enough — other tickets name the lane in prose and would keep pointing at the wrong one. Known today: rainy-day/feature-os-targets-bsd-mac.md says "[[feature-port-windows-pe]] (Track W)". Grep for Track W in live tickets as part of the change, not after.

That ticket also carries NO track field at all, so it is invisible to the ranker for the same reason the W tickets are — worth sweeping for while in here.

Future platform campaigns take the same shape (2026-08-08)

BSD and macOS will raise this again and the answer is already settled by the S/M precedent: one tag per FAMILY, not per variant. S covers ESP32/S2/S3/C3 with the variant named in the ticket text; a BSD tag would cover Free/Open/Net/Dragon the same way. The apparent letter shortage (A=Apple, O=OpenBSD, F=FreeBSD all colliding or ambiguous) is an artifact of assuming one letter per OS.

Deferring is FREE, and that is worth stating because it is not obvious: a lane cannot be deferred (exclusive file ownership must be declared before two agents collide), but a tag can, because it is a view over tickets that already exist. It can be minted later and applied retroactively by slug pattern. BSD/macOS work can land as A/B/T today and be grouped whenever the board has enough rows to want it.

Do NOT retro-edit done/

Several closed tickets reference "the website (Track W)". Those are historical records of what was true when written; correcting them falsifies history (CLAUDE.md, precedence rule). Fix live tickets and the tooling; leave the record alone.

Log

• 2026-08-08 — found while filing a website ticket. The agent grepped frontmatter, found only Windows, and "corrected" the user's (accurate) statement that W was the website lane. The user pushed back from memory and was right. Filed rather than fixed on the spot because it overturns a considered decision and touches ~8 tickets.

Resolution (2026-08-08)

Done as specified. W = website (file-lane, keeps the letter), M = MSWindows (work-tag, A/B/T file ownership per ticket).

1. Frontmatter track: W -> track: M on the four Windows tickets (feature-port-windows-pe, feature-t-windows-wine-harness, feature-pcl-tk-windows-compat, feature-pcl-win32-widgetset).
2. Live cross-references fixed: rainy-day/feature-os-targets-bsd-mac, decided/decide-nilpy-gui-tk-vs-pcl, and the Type line of feature-pcl-tk-windows-compat. The remaining live "Track W" mentions (docs-canonical-domain, feature-release-checksums-repro, the three feature-web-*) all MEAN website and are correct untouched. done/ left alone per the precedence rule.
3. tools/progress.py: M and W added to --track choices and to normalize_track. An M decl-line rule plus -(windows|win32|wine)- slug auto-tagging, mirroring S. S was missing from normalize_track's character class too — a ticket declaring track: S in frontmatter alone had it silently stripped; fixed in the same pass. Name aliases added: WEBSITE->W, WINDOWS/MSWINDOWS->M.
4. CLAUDE.md: Track W (file-lane, separate repo) and Track M (work-tag, S's shape) sections plus both one-liners; "D (docs/website)" corrected to "D (docs; the website itself is W)".

Verified by diffing every ticket's computed track before and after: exactly the 9 intended rows moved (4 -> M, 5 -> W) and nothing else.

Correction to this ticket's own second finding

The M slug rule needed a tie-break the S rule does not have: this ticket (meta-track-w-collision-windows-vs-website, a Track A board-hygiene item) auto-tagged itself M off its own slug. An explicit contradicting track: / **Track:** declaration now wins over the slug arm — a ticket ABOUT a campaign is not a ticket IN it. S has the same latent hole; it has not bitten yet.

Correction: the "invisible to the ranker" claim was too strong

feature-os-targets-bsd-mac and ~130 other live tickets carry no frontmatter track:, but they are NOT invisible — the **Track:** / **Type:** prose fallback resolves them (bsd-mac -> A, correctly). Missing frontmatter is the norm here, not an anomaly, so a 130-ticket backfill was NOT done as part of this change. What genuinely was invisible was the unrecognised LETTER, which is fixed. The third finding (make check flag prose-only track declarations) is left open and split out: [[chore-progress-flag-prose-only-track-decl]].

• 2026-08-08 — resolved, commit 2f007a819.