Sign off the house way

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

Shortcut	Why 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.