agentsclimarketplace

Sign off the house way

Skill serhiy-bzhezytskyy/contrib-receipts/skills/sign-off-the-house-way

Claude Code skills for contributing to someone else's repo — each rule backed by a real receipt. Bring help, not noise.

Install
npx -y skills add serhiy-bzhezytskyy/contrib-receipts --skill sign-off-the-house-way

Assembled from the repository path, not quoted from the project. Check it against their README if it does not work.

2 things to look at

  • 13 days oldThe repository was created 13 days ago. New is not bad, but a brand new repository carrying a familiar-sounding name is the shape a typosquat arrives in, and there has been no time for anyone else to find a problem with it.
  • 1 stars1 stars. Stars are a popularity signal and not a quality one, but at this level it is likely that nobody has read this closely except its author, and you would be relying on your own review.

What its author says it does

Copied from the file, not written here

Before opening a PR, know which contributor sign-off THAT house requires and make sure it's present — the contracts differ by house and a missing one is an instant, automated "didn't read the rules" bounce. Eclipse projects (e.g. Jetty) gate every PR on an ECA plus a DCO `Signed-off-by` trailer on each commit; Apache projects (Solr/Lucene) use a CLA with the committer resolving on merge and need no per-commit trailer; other houses need neither. Check the house's contract first, not after a bot rejects you. Use at front-gate, before the first commit. Trigger terms: DCO, ECA, CLA, Signed-off-by, sign-off, `git commit -s`, eca check, contributor agreement.

SKILL.md

4.7 KB, ~1.0k tokens by cl100k_base, as published. Nobody here has run it

Sign off the house way

Purpose

Every house has a legal-provenance contract for outside contributions, and it is enforced by a bot before a human ever looks at the change. Get it wrong and the PR lands with a red check and a canned rejection — you read as someone who didn't read the rules, which is exactly the "noise" signal this whole repo tries to avoid. The trap is assuming one house's contract is universal: a Signed-off-by trailer that Eclipse requires is simply noise in an Apache PR, and skipping it on an Eclipse PR blocks the merge outright. The contract is house-specific; learn it before the first commit, because a DCO trailer is set at commit time and is painful to add later (interactive rebase across every commit).

When to use

  • Before the first commit on a repo you haven't contributed to before.
  • When a PR comes back with a red legal/agreement check (ECA, CLA, DCO).
  • When you're unsure whether to pass -s to git commit.

When NOT to use

This covers the legal SIGN-OFF contract; for the build/format/generator gate the house runs on your code, that's obey-the-houses-own-tooling.

The practice (checklist)

  • Identify the house's contract before committing: check CONTRIBUTING, the PR template, and the checks that ran on a recent merged PR (gh pr checks <n>).
  • Eclipse (Jetty): sign the ECA once under the same email you commit with, and add a DCO trailer to every commit — git commit -s (or -s on rebase).
  • Apache (Solr/Lucene): no per-commit trailer; the committer resolves the CLA/ICLA on merge. Don't add a Signed-off-by — it isn't the house convention.
  • Make the commit email match the agreement you signed (a mismatch fails the ECA even when the agreement exists).
  • If a legal check is red, fix it before pinging a human — it's your court.

Rationalizations

ShortcutWhy it fails
"Sign-off is boilerplate, I'll add it if a bot complains."The DCO trailer is set at commit time; retrofitting it means rebasing every commit. Do it up front with -s, not after a red check.
"One house wanted Signed-off-by, so I'll always add it."It's house-specific — required on Eclipse, not the convention on Apache. A stray trailer on an Apache PR reads as copy-paste from another project.
"The legal check is red but the code is fine, a reviewer will wave it through."Automated agreement gates don't get waved through; an unresolved ECA/CLA blocks merge regardless of code quality, and leaving it red is your unfinished move.

RECEIPT

Eclipse / Jetty — ECA + per-commit DCO, verified via gh 2026-07-24. The eclipsefdn/eca check gates every PR and passed on #15435, #15472, and #15473:

"The author(s) of the pull request is covered by necessary legal agreements in order to proceed!"

and #15435 carries a Signed-off-by trailer on all 3 of its 3 commits (gh pr view 15435 --repo jetty/jetty.project --json commits).

Apache / Solr — CLA-on-merge, no per-commit DCO, verified via gh. Merged PR #4632 carries zero Signed-off-by trailers — consistent with Apache's model where the committer resolves the agreement on merge and no per-commit sign-off is expected. Two houses contributed to in the same month, two different contracts.

Lifecycle

  • Signals it worked: the legal check is green on first push; no rebase-to-add- sign-off round-trip; no "please sign the ECA/CLA" comment from a bot or maintainer.
  • What to log on a misfire: which house, which contract you got wrong (missing trailer / stray trailer / email mismatch), and what the gate said. Record it in LEDGER.md.
  • Death criterion: retire for a house only if it drops its agreement gate entirely; the contracts themselves change rarely.
  • Relates to: a front-gate sibling of obey-the-houses-own-tooling — both are "read this house's rules before you touch it", one for the legal sign-off, one for the build/generator tooling.

Gives 0 of the 12 instructions most pr commit review skills give in ~1.0k tokens

Counted across 888 of the 1,342 authors here whose files we hold, read 2026-08-07

  • use conventional commits formatin 127 of 888, across 115 files
  • keep subject line under 72 charactersin 62 of 888, across 48 files
  • delete branches after mergein 51 of 888, across 38 files
  • use imperative mood in subject linein 51 of 888, across 42 files
  • use imperative mood in commit messagesin 44 of 888
  • verify directory is ignored before creating worktreein 43 of 888, across 12 files
  • generate a conventional commit messagein 43 of 888
  • add unignored worktree directories to gitignorein 42 of 888, across 10 files
  • make atomic commitsin 39 of 888, across 27 files
  • run tests before committingin 36 of 888, across 25 files
  • verify clean test baselinein 35 of 888, across 9 files
  • split unrelated changes into separate commitsin 35 of 888, across 30 files

Said here and by no other author read

  • identify the house contract before committing
  • add DCO trailer to every Eclipse commit
  • use git commit -s for Eclipse sign-off
  • omit per-commit trailer for Apache projects
  • match commit email to the signed agreement
  • fix red legal checks before pinging a human

Grouped from the skills themselves: near-identical wordings counted once, and counted by distinct author, so one author publishing three of these counts once. Length counted with cl100k_base; the agent that loads this file may tokenize it differently.

Keep looking

Skills are one crate of 328,083. Ordering is by how many stacks a row turns up in, so the top of any crate is what has actually been picked rather than what has the most stars.