0039. Retire legacy chat-room evaluation paths

Status: Accepted · 2026-08-27 · #451 Supersedes: 0024, 0027

TL;DR Keep examples/chat-room as a small executable example, but retire its independent package consumer and recorded case study. The drawing-game studies and clean-adoption fixtures now own those maintained evaluation roles.

Decision

Real Socket.IO remains the behavioral reference. The drawing-game compatibility study runs its shared workflow against Real Socket.IO and workspace Smocket, while its maintenance study records staged handwritten implementations. Clean-adoption fixtures install the exact candidate or reviewed published packages outside the checkout.

Those maintained paths replace the chat-room consumer and case-study runners, fixtures, observations, and historical interpretation. examples/chat-room stays because its short CLI and dual-target test remain useful executable documentation without owning a separate package or evidence snapshot.

The reviewed published version lives in consumers/published-release.json. This keeps scheduled registry validation explicit without retaining an application-specific manifest and lockfile as the release pin.

Alternatives rejected

• Keep every evaluation path. Duplicate package and case-study paths can report old versions as current evidence and multiply maintenance without adding a distinct claim.
• Remove the chat-room example too. The example still provides a compact program and CI smoke path that is separate from independent package and comparison evidence.
• Delete decisions 0024 and 0027. Superseding them preserves why the retired structure existed and records which maintained paths replaced it.