A gate question belongs to the initiator, and an ownerless one is findable
A question assigned to whoever happened to persist it (a background worker with no identity) matches nobody's inbox and is never answered. A run with no initiator at all needs somewhere for its question to land.
The rule
Normative: this is the rule
- A gate interrupt is assigned to the run's initiator (the owner of the job, as stamped when the run was launched) and never to whichever identity happens to persist it.
- A run with no initiator, such as one launched by a schedule, a webhook or an anonymous trigger, raises its question unassigned.
- Unassigned gate questions are visible to holders of the authority to resolve any interrupt; this is the only relaxation of the inbox's scoping to the owning identity, and it covers unassigned gate questions only.
- An assigned question stays scoped to its owner whatever authority the viewer holds (being able to resolve any interrupt grants resolution, not a merged inbox), and an unassigned question that is not a gate question stays invisible.
- Where nobody attends an unassigned gate question it expires and the run is cancelled (RT-GATE-1, INT-18): fail closed, never silently approved.
Rule identifiers are permanent and are never renumbered. Each implementation publishes its own standing against these rules; this specification does not.spec 1.0-draft · RT-GATE-13 · changed in spec 1.0