every.channel/evolution/proposals/ECP-0079-governance-quality-gates-and-branch-protection.md

ECP-0079: Governance Hygiene, CI Quality Gates, and Main-Branch Protection

Status: Implemented

Context

Recent delivery velocity improved product behavior, but governance and quality signals drifted:

• active ECPs were not consistently marked with explicit status and alternatives;
• pull requests lacked a single, explicit CI gate for core tests plus web build;
• deploy could proceed without an explicit prerequisite check job;
• branch protection settings were not codified as an operator runbook artifact.

This conflicts with the constitutional requirement that non-trivial changes remain reviewable and merge through pull requests.

Decision

1. Normalize governance records for the active proposal window (ECP-0063 through ECP-0078):
   • mark implemented decisions as Status: Implemented,
   • add explicit Alternatives considered sections,
   • ensure rollout/teardown intent is present.
2. Add scripts/ecp-lint.sh and run it in CI to enforce required ECP sections for active proposals.
3. Add a ci-gates workflow for pull requests that runs:
   • ECP lint,
   • core Rust test subset,
   • apps/web production build.
4. Update deploy workflow to include a dedicated checks job and make deploy depend on that job.
5. Correct Cloudflare deploy docs so manual commands and secret prerequisites match current implementation.
6. Add a branch-protection enforcement script and runbook so main can be locked to PR merges with required checks.

Alternatives considered

• Keep governance cleanup manual and ad hoc. Rejected because drift reappears quickly under fast iteration.
• Gate only deploy, not pull requests. Rejected because review-time feedback is required before merge.
• Rely on UI-only branch protection configuration with no repo script/runbook. Rejected because settings become opaque and harder to audit.

Rollout / teardown plan

• Rollout:
  • land ECP updates + lint script + CI workflows + docs + branch-protection tooling together;
  • apply branch protection using the new script;
  • set required check context to ci-gates / checks.
• Teardown:
  • remove ci-gates workflow and lint script if governance process is superseded;
  • relax branch protection via API/script and adjust constitutional process in a superseding ECP.