No Claude co-author trailers on packages commits

  • Status: accepted
  • Scope: packages
  • Date: 2026-07-03

Context and Problem Statement

The packages component is a fork of the OpenWrt packages feed (openwrt/packages, GPL-2.0). Work done here may be offered back to that upstream, whose commit history carries no AI-assistant co-author trailers and whose authorship attribution stays clean for a community feed. This host's default agent behaviour appends a Co-Authored-By: Claude ... trailer to commit messages. That trailer is unwanted on any commit in the packages worktree.

Decision

Every commit created in the packages worktree (software/packages/<branch>/) omits the Co-Authored-By: Claude ... trailer. An agent committing under software/packages/ suppresses the trailer its default behaviour would add. The prohibition is scoped to the packages component; the operator confirmed the scope is packages only, so commits in this host repository keep the trailer as before.

Consequences

  • Good: packages commits stay upstream-clean, so a change offered to openwrt/packages needs no trailer scrubbing.
  • Neutral: the rule is a commit-message convention rather than a hook the host enforces, because the packages worktree is a separate repository with its own hooks. An agent honours it by reading this decision and the CLAUDE.md project-specifics note that points here.
  • Follow-up: if upstream provenance later needs a DCO sign-off or another trailer policy, record it as a sibling decision under the same scope.