Archive identity and sealing

inspect-archive reports the identity of an .aie archive. seal-archive copies a legacy seekable v1 container into the authenticated v2 container without decompressing, recompressing, or changing its encoded section payloads.

Inspect an archive

aie inspect-archive sample.aie
aie inspect-archive sample.aie --verify-content

Normal v2 inspection authenticates the directory/root and reports the scheme-independent encoded-section identity. Payload digests are checked when sections are selected. --verify-content additionally reads and verifies every compressed payload. A v1 archive has no committed directory, so even ordinary identity inspection requires one complete file scan.

Inspection also reports the archive’s logical evidence capabilities. For a current ingest it includes gravlax.molecular-evidence.v2, the full parsed alignment-provenance manifest, and terminal-tail availability plus its event, molecule, and routed-chunk counts. It also reports the current genome-reference binding, including whether it was established at ingest or by stamp-genome. It verifies an embedded junction catalogue’s length, BLAKE3 digest, and parsed row count against the manifest. Older archives state that alignment provenance and terminal tails are unavailable, and label any genome signature as legacy/unattributed; inspection never guesses “one pass” or reports a missing tail section as zero. An unknown logical schema, a declared section that is absent, an undeclared capability section, or a side-section identity mismatch is an error.

The human output and --json object remain available; both include these capability fields. For the shared result contract, use:

aie inspect-archive sample.aie --format json
aie inspect-archive sample.aie --verify-content \
  --format tsv --output sample.identity.tsv

--format accepts text, tsv, or json. --output requires --format, is checked before the archive is opened, and atomically installs a complete file without replacing an existing path. The gravlax.archive.inspect-report.v1 summary contains the native and encoded-section identities, format and file sizes, verification mode, and bytes read, together with the same logical-schema, alignment-provenance, terminal-tail, and genome-reference-binding fields. The streamed sections table carries exact raw and compressed byte counts. Machine-readable stdout contains no progress text.

Seal a legacy archive

aie seal-archive legacy.aie --out rooted.aie
aie seal-archive legacy.aie --out rooted.aie \
  --report-format json --report-output seal-report.json

The destination archive is always installed without replacement. Sealing validates every legacy frame, copies its exact compressed bytes, builds and authenticates the v2 directory, verifies the completed output, and checks that its aie-encoded-sections-v1 identity equals the source identity before installation.

Omitting report flags preserves the established human output and --json record. --report-format text|tsv|json selects the uniform gravlax.archive.seal-report.v1 result; --report-output publishes it atomically without replacement. The report path is preflighted before the archive conversion starts. Scientific and byte-accounting totals are result data, while source/output paths and invocation choices remain provenance.

The archive and operation report have separate commit points. A report publication error can occur after the already-verified archive has been successfully installed; retrying must use a new report path and must not re-run sealing against the occupied archive destination.