The product README was under windows/ after the move, but it was never a component readme: it is the download page, the feature guide and the contribution guide for the whole product, so it goes back to the root and windows/ gets a real component readme.
AGENTS.md at the root now carries the repository map, the component boundaries that used to be cross-repository rules, and the release process, since the scripts that process drives live at the root. The component files keep what is genuinely theirs and say which paths they are relative to. References that named sibling repositories now name sibling directories, and the lock documentation records that Server, the pages, the GUI framework and the installer are no longer inputs to pin.
The lock pins immutable commits, but nothing checked that anybody merged them. Today it pins server 40d85a4 and engine 9a4b0c6, both of which exist only on architecture/product-contracts branches, and a release built from this commit would have shipped and attested to a Server that never reached main. The release job's existing provenance check covers only the TSF commit being released, not the inputs the lock names.
verify-published compares each locked commit against its own repository's default branch and accepts only behind or identical, the two states that mean it is an ancestor. ahead and diverged both mean the commit sits on something nobody merged.
It runs in the release path and deliberately not in product-ci.yml. A pull request legitimately locks branch commits while one change lands across several repositories at once, which is exactly the situation this branch is in; enforcing reachability in pull request CI would deadlock the landing it exists to protect. At release time the judgement inverts, because an input that never reached its default branch is an input nobody reviewed.
Evan Hu