re0-merge

Land a contribution fairly: credit preserved, the maintainer's changes legible, accepted on the record.

Goal

A contribution is a gift with a permanent carrying cost, and a review either honors both or fails one. re0-merge walks whoever reviews — any collaborator or maintainer, not just the author — through accepting a pull request the way this suite does: judged against the thesis, landed with the author's authorship intact, the maintainer's own edits kept as separate commits, and closed with an approval and a credit rather than a silent rejection.

Workflow

1. Gate before landing. An additive contribution is declined by default; the burden is on the addition to show the suite is worse without it, not on you to justify a no. Judge each PR alone, never as a batch: a bug-fix subtracts a defect and is the easy yes; new tooling earns a place only if it mechanizes a rule already enforced by hand; a new skill lands only if it closes a real gap no existing one covers. A well-reasoned decline is a shipped outcome, not a failure.
2. Cold-read it first. Read the contribution end to end with fresh eyes (a shower pass when installed) before deciding; a name or claim that reads clean to its author may not to a stranger.
3. Verify, do not re-fix. Where the author already pushed a fix, prove it with a throwaway regression case rather than rewriting it; the credit for the fix is theirs.
4. Approve as you accept, then land on a land/pr-<n> branch (a range only for a genuine multi-PR batch). Submit the approving review the moment you decide to accept, before the land — it is a verdict on the contributor's code, not a receipt for a release, and giving it now (not bundled with the later close) is what keeps a closed-not-merged PR reading as accepted. Then accept each contributor commit with its authorship preserved (you become the committer; clean the message with re0-git), add every maintainer change as its own separate commit so the credit split stays legible, and fast-forward into main.
5. Complete a new skill, don't merge it raw. Get the name right (a plain real word or tight compression, no opaque coinage), the invocation right (model- vs user-invoked), and the home right; then register it on every roster surface (plugin.json, the README Index in root and every localized copy, re0-upgrade's Current catalog, scripts/catalog.cjs) so no drift-guard trips.
6. After the release the contribution shipped in confirms, close the PR with the comment. Close it in the same motion as a comment that credits and explains — never a silent close, and never before the release lands. The approval from step 4 already records it as accepted; this step only closes and explains.
7. The comment credits and explains, warmly. Shout the contribution out in the release notes with its PR number and author handle; and if you renamed or reframed anything, the closing comment thanks the author, says what changed and why, points at the release it shipped in, and hands the credit for the core idea back to them.

Rules