[framsouza]

Summary

Adds a short Recipe stewardship and composition note to the Recipe Development Guide's Overview, explaining that a resolved recipe is materialized from a composition graph rather than authored as one standalone, independently owned file.

Motivation / Context

Readers of the Recipe Development Guide can come away thinking a resolved recipe is a flat configuration artifact with a single owner (NCP vs. ISV vs. NVIDIA). It is not — it is materialized from a directed acyclic graph of registry defaults, overlays, mixins, configuration profiles, and optional external --data input.

The issue originally proposed a "Recipe ownership and provenance" note plus a separate FAQ entry. @mchmarny narrowed the scope in #2270 (comment) and the reporter agreed. This PR implements that narrowed scope:

• One note, under the Overview — no FAQ entry, which would duplicate it (and the docs tree has no FAQ page).
• Avoids describing the output as having "no owner". Ownership is collective at the project level: AICR maintainers are accountable for the catalog accepted into the project, and the AICR community collectively owns and evolves it.
• States that metadata.appliedOverlays records resolution order and is deliberately not an ownership or per-field attribution ledger — resolution materializes the effective configuration rather than preserving authorship for every contributing value.
• States that repository history identifies contributions to source files, which describes the layer, not the resolved recipe.

Fixes: #2270
Related: N/A

Type of Change

• Bug fix (non-breaking change that fixes an issue)
• New feature (non-breaking change that adds functionality)
• Breaking change (fix or feature that would cause existing functionality to change)
• Documentation update
• Refactoring (no functional changes)
• Build/CI/tooling

Component(s) Affected

• CLI (cmd/aicr, pkg/cli)
• API server (cmd/aicrd, pkg/server)
• Recipe engine / data (pkg/recipe)
• Bundlers (pkg/bundler, pkg/component/*)
• Collectors / snapshotter (pkg/collector, pkg/snapshotter)
• Validator (pkg/validator)
• Core libraries (pkg/errors, pkg/k8s)
• Docs/examples (docs/, examples/)
• Other: ____________

Implementation Notes

Placement. The note lands as a ### subsection closing out ## Overview in docs/integrator/recipe-development.md, immediately after the existing "For query matching and overlay merging internals" pointer. A heading rather than a bold paragraph is correct per the repo's Documentation Style rule — it names a topic and runs past the ~8-content-line threshold — and it gives the note a stable anchor to link at. Heading text is sentence case, matching existing siblings in this file (### Inference performance constraints, ### Regional registry overrides).

Links. Three, each verified against a live heading:

Link	Target
#configuration-profiles	### Configuration Profiles, same file
../contributor/recipe.md#observable-reciperesult-surfaces	## Observable RecipeResult Surfaces — where Metadata.AppliedOverlays is actually documented
GOVERNANCE.md#areas-of-ownership	## Areas of Ownership

GOVERNANCE.md is linked as an absolute https://github.com/NVIDIA/aicr/blob/main/... URL, per the existing convention for repo-root files — a relative path would escape the Fern docs root. The two in-docs links are relative.

Deliberately not linked: docs/contributor/maintaining.md → ### `maintainers:` Block Routing (Post PR-D). Its slug is ambiguous (backticks, colon, parentheses) and it has zero existing inbound links, so it is a broken-anchor risk.

No docs/index.yml change — the page is already registered, and the Fern nav lists pages only, not per-page anchors.

Terminology note: "ownership" is already load-bearing in this guide for the GPU-stack sense (which component owns the driver / device plugin). The new prose keeps its subject unmistakably the recipe.

Testing

# Docs gates (all pass)
make lint-yaml check-agents-sync check-docs-filenames check-docs-mdx check-docs-mdx-parse check-docs-yaml
#   OK: AGENTS.md is in sync with .claude/CLAUDE.md
#   OK: all doc filenames follow kebab-case convention
#   OK: all doc files are MDX-safe
#   OK: 62 doc file(s) parse as MDX
#   OK: 186 YAML block(s) in 111 Markdown file(s) parse successfully

# Link check — CI's exact invocation, across all of docs/
lychee --offline --no-progress 'docs/**/*.md'
#   1587 Total | 759 Unique | 894 OK | 0 Errors | 693 Excluded

# Link check — stricter than CI, with anchor/fragment resolution on the changed file
lychee --offline --no-progress --include-fragments 'docs/integrator/recipe-development.md'
#   67 Total | 57 Unique | 45 OK | 0 Errors | 22 Excluded

go vet ./...                 # clean
go test ./pkg/recipe/...     # ok (recipe, catalog, ocisource, oskind)

make qualify was not run locally. The dev box is missing 20 of the 26 pinned tools (golangci-lint, addlicense, goreleaser, grype, syft, chainsaw, …) and qualify additionally runs e2e against a Kind cluster, so both make lint and make license fail on missing binaries rather than on this change. No .go files are touched, so the mandatory per-package Go lint gate and the test-coverage gate do not apply; the checks this change could plausibly break are the docs gates and lychee, which are run above. Deferring to the merge gate for the remainder.

Risk Assessment

• Low — Isolated change, well-tested, easy to revert
• Medium — Touches multiple components or has broader impact
• High — Breaking change, affects critical paths, or complex rollout

Documentation-only: 19 added lines in one file, no code, no behavior change.

Rollout notes: N/A

Checklist

• Tests pass locally (make test with -race) — scoped to ./pkg/recipe/...; no Go changes in this PR
• Linter passes (make lint) — docs gates pass; Go/license lint blocked on missing local tools, see Testing
• I did not skip/disable tests to make CI green
• I added/updated tests for new functionality — N/A, docs only
• I updated docs if user-facing behavior changed
• Changes follow existing patterns in the codebase
• Commits are cryptographically signed (git commit -S)

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📝 Walkthrough

Walkthrough

The Recipe Development Guide adds a section on recipe stewardship and composition. It explains that resolved recipes combine multiple configuration sources, describes community ownership and maintainer accountability, and clarifies what overlay metadata and repository history indicate about provenance.

Priority: ⬇️ Low

Estimated code review effort: 1 (Trivial) | ~4 minutes

Change: Other

Suggested reviewers: yuanchen8911

Merge Risk: ⚪ Minimal · up to c3c6a

This documentation change accurately clarifies recipe composition and provenance; no material merge risk remains.

🚥 Pre-merge checks | ✅ 4

✅ Passed checks (4 passed)

Check name	Status	Explanation
Linked Issues check	✅ Passed	The PR implements the coding requirement in #2270. It adds the “Recipe stewardship and composition” note to docs/integrator/recipe-development.md. The note explains composition from registry default…
Out of Scope Changes check	✅ Passed	The reported change is limited to 19 documentation lines in docs/integrator/recipe-development.md. The content directly supports #2270 by clarifying recipe composition, stewardship, ownership, and p…
Title check	✅ Passed	The title clearly and concisely describes the documentation change to clarify recipe stewardship and composition.
Description check	✅ Passed	The description directly explains the documentation change, its motivation, scope, implementation details, and validation results.

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[mchmarny]

Congrats, @framsouza, this is the 3000th PR in AICR!

[github-actions]

🌿 Preview your docs: https://nvidia-preview-docs-recipe-stewardship-composition-2270.docs.buildwithfern.com/aicr

[mchmarny]

Approve: no findings against 78ce779.