box/CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing

How change lands in this repo. The short version: PRs are born as drafts, three reviewer bots take the first rounds, a human takes the last word — and labels tell you where everything is without opening anything.

The PR loop

1. Fork and branch. Contributors work from forks; upstream branches are for maintainers. Title the PR conventionally (feat:, fix:, docs:), and include a CHANGELOG.md entry under ## Unreleased when the change deserves one.
2. Open as a draft while you build. Drafts are invisible to the reviewer bots on purpose.
3. When it's ready: mark ready-for-review and request all three bots — claude-bot-andresmgsl, codex-bot-andresmgsl, grok-bot-andresmgsl. They poll roughly every 15 minutes.
4. Rounds are answered whole. Wait until all three have reviewed, then answer the entire round in a single reply, push the fixes, and re-request the bots that didn't approve. Prefer verification over argument: a test settles what a comment thread can't.
5. Reviews end in a verdict. A reviewer — bot or human — either approves or requests changes, never a bare comment. A comment-only review is a non-verdict: it doesn't say whether the round passed, and the state machine (and anyone scanning the board) has to guess. The verdict carries blockingness only, the body carries the feedback: non-blocking nits ride an approval and the author addresses them at their discretion; anything blocking — including a question that gates the verdict — is request changes, saying what unblocks it. The reconciler treats a comment-only review as not-approved, so commenting without a verdict only stalls the PR. The machine never reads review bodies: when a comment-only reviewer's line is really an agreement, that judgment belongs to the author — escalate by requesting the maintainer's review (step 6), and the reconciler flips the label on that request, because an explicit request is a fact it can trust.
6. When the round passes, the author hands the PR to the maintainer by requesting their review — that request is what flips state:needs-human. With three formal head-current approvals the labels workflow requests it automatically; when part of the panel is comment-only, reading their agreement is the author's judgment, so the author makes the request.
7. Checks must be green: shellcheck and bash test/cli.sh locally mirror what CI runs; the multi-user rehearsal runs in CI on a real Incus.

Releases

A release is a PR, and merging it ships it (#96, building on #83):

1. The release PR — release: X.Y.Z, labeled release — bumps VERSION from X.Y.Z-dev and stamps the ## Unreleased section with version + date (feature PRs land their changelog entry as part of the PR, so the section is already written).

   Stamping is two edits, not one — the second is re-arming. After rewriting ## Unreleased into ## X.Y.Z — DATE, put an empty ## Unreleased back at the top, immediately above the section you just stamped:

   ## Unreleased
   
   ## 0.7.1 — 2026-07-19
   
   ### Fixed
   ...
   

   Not cosmetic, and not deferrable to the next PR that happens to need it. Between the stamp and the next re-creation of that heading, main has no ## Unreleased. A PR authored before the release wrote its entry under that heading; with the heading gone, git lands the entry under whatever now occupies the position — the section that just shipped — and it merges cleanly, no conflict, no signal. The changelog then credits a released version with a change it does not contain, and nothing but a human reading the file will ever say so (#108; confirmed in the sibling repo as heavy-duty/rig#66).

   CI enforces the arming rule with .github/scripts/changelog-armed.sh, keyed on VERSION: a -dev tree must carry ## Unreleased on top; a bare-VERSION tree (the ceremony PR, and the merge that publishes it) may carry either ## Unreleased or its own stamped section. That is why the guard cannot simply demand ## Unreleased unconditionally — the unconditional form is false on the ceremony PR's own tree and makes the release unshippable, which is why rig and cast both reverted it. The practical consequence: forgetting to re-arm does not block the release PR, it turns main red on the very next push — the automatic -dev bump the release itself makes. Do it in the ceremony PR and main is never disarmed at all.

   This PR is where the release ritual hangs: the full drill on real hardware, recorded in drill/RUNS.md — CI proves the tier's semantics on every PR, a release still proves the boundary.

2. The maintainer's merge IS the release. release.yml fires on the merged, release-labeled PR and asserts before creating anything: VERSION at the merge commit is non--dev and changed in this PR (the -dev interlock — a mislabeled ordinary PR fails loudly and creates nothing), the version's CHANGELOG.md section extracts non-empty, and no tag or release exists for it yet. Then, in the same job, it tags the merge commit bare X.Y.Z (no v prefix, the 0.6.0 precedent) and publishes the GitHub release with that section as the body. No assets — the source tarball for the tag is the package, and install.sh downloads exactly that.

   Manual fallback/backfill: the tag-push path stays. Tagging the merge commit bare X.Y.Z by hand and pushing the tag still publishes the same way (release.yml asserts the tag names the tree's own VERSION) — for backfills, or the day the merge path is red.

3. The release re-arms main itself: the same workflow run bumps VERSION to X.Y.(Z+1)-dev and pushes the commit straight to main — no follow-up PR (it opens one only if branch protection refuses the direct push, and says so loudly). Not cosmetic — the versioned layout names install trees after VERSION, so a main install without the bump would land in versions/X.Y.Z and impersonate the release just cut. On the manual tag path the bump stays yours: open the one-line PR after publishing.

Labels — who sets what

The full taxonomy lives in LABELS.md. What matters day to day is who sets each kind — most of it is machinery, and hand-moving a machine-owned label just gets corrected on the next pass:

Labels	Set by
state:*	the labels workflow (.github/workflows/labels.yml) — recomputed from GitHub's own facts every 15 minutes and on PR events. Never by hand.
stale	the same workflow — 48h without commits, comments, or reviews. blocked PRs are exempt: they are quiet legitimately.
scope:* on PRs	actions/labeler, from the changed paths (.github/labeler.yml). Additive — you may add more, the machine won't remove them.
scope:* on issues	you, when opening or triaging — issues have no paths to derive from.
blocked, release	you — automation never guesses intent.
bug / enhancement / documentation	you, on issues only — a PR's type already lives in its title.

Issues

Give issues the same care as PR titles: say the surface in the title, apply a scope: label and a type label (bug / enhancement / documentation) when you open one, and blocked when it waits on something — that is what keeps the board navigable as the issue count grows.