id: ADR-0034 title: Govern with a single maintainer, PR-only squash merges onto a linear signed main status: accepted date: 2026-09-13 deciders: [paul-heyse] level: decision principles: [DM-14, DM-45, DM-60] blueprint: [§0.1] review: not-required: a repository-governance decision; neither review raised a finding against it evidence: Proposed supersedes: [] superseded-by: null revisit: A second maintainer joins, which changes the approval count, the bypass policy and the project board question verification: governance / pr-title; the main ruleset declared in .github/setup/*.json and applied by just gh-setup (re-running it is a no-op)

ADR-0034: Govern with a single maintainer, PR-only squash merges onto a linear signed main

Context

The project has one maintainer, is public, and will accept outside contributions. The rules have to protect history and provenance without requiring a reviewer who does not exist.

Scope

Binds branch protection, merge strategy, approvals, signing and where the rules are declared. Labels, milestones and issue forms follow from it.

Drivers

A linear signed history is what makes a release tag mean something; zero approvals is honest for a sole maintainer where pretending otherwise would mean self-approval theatre; declared configuration is reviewable, clicked configuration is not.

Options

Require one approval — rejected: the sole maintainer would approve their own PRs. Allow direct pushes to main — rejected: no check would ever run before a change lands. Merge commits — rejected: squash keeps the Conventional-Commit title as the changelog unit.

Outcome

Single maintainer; every change arrives as a PR; squash merge only with the PR title as the commit subject; main requires linear history and signatures and forbids deletion and non-fast-forward; the ruleset is declared in .github/setup/*.json and applied idempotently.

Consequences

Bypass is restricted to the admin role and every bypass push requires a governance follow-up issue. Required checks are staged: a check that never reports would block every PR (§6).

Compensating controls

governance / pr-title enforces the Conventional-Commit types and scopes from cliff.toml, which is what git-cliff reads to build the changelog.

Confirmation

just gh-setup re-applies the declared configuration; a drift shows up as a diff in the applied JSON rather than as a surprise.

Pros and cons

Zero approvals is weak; the compensating control is that every check is required and history is protected.

More information

GOVERNANCE.md; blueprint §0.1; .github/setup/; ADR-0001’s decision-PR rule.

Status history

• 2026-09-13 — accepted with the repository-seeding pull request (backfilled from blueprint revision 3).