I'm adding a few links here so I and others can find them easily.
Ubuntu Recovery partition specs
Touch/Specs/RecoveryPartition last edited 2013-06-14
upgrader
ImageBasedUpgrades/Upgrader l st edited 2014-07-04
After more digging I've come to the conclusion that Edify stuff is mostly dead code. I'll leave these two links until I'm certain.
https://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Doc:_About_Edify
(http://forum.xda-developers.com/wiki/Edify_script_language)
I have been working under the assumption that
system-image-upgader
Was written by Marius become it seemed to come from nowhere in the ubports git history.
In reality launchpad does reveal its arrival three years ago.
author Stéphane Graber stgraber@ubuntu.com
Tue, 9 Jul 2013 15:00:00 -0500 (17:00 -0300)
committer Gerrit Code Review gerrit2@hesperidium.canonical.com
Fri, 7 Feb 2014 09:03:14 -0500 (14:03 +0000)
It's interesting to note that six months seems to have passed before it was accepted. It then goes through much development in 2014.