repo-standard/CHANGELOG.md

Changelog

All notable changes to this project are documented here. Format follows Keep a Changelog; versioning is Semantic Versioning.

[0.4.0] — 2026-08-09

Added

• LINKS-OPEN-REFS: the open/ reference check now reports its own result instead of only its failures. Emitting nothing on success made "no dead references" and "the check never ran" identical in the output — a sweep across the org could not tell 19 clean repos from 19 unread ones (measured: org-ops census 03b). The OK line carries the count it resolved, because an OK that cannot say how many it checked is the same silence in a different colour. Zero enumerated files is now LINKS-OPEN-REFS-UNAVAILABLE (SKIP), which is the honest name for the case that used to look like a pass.
• portfolio-optimiser-commons registered as shared-asset, the org's 20th repo. Class verified structurally rather than accepted: absent from the catalog's marketplace.json, no .claude-plugin/, README.md + LICENSE present, consumed by both reference implementations as a git subtree — so vendor is the right install form and ## Install would be wrong to require. Its absence was producing three false LINK-DEAD ERRORs in portfolio-optimiser against a repo that exists, and leaving repo #20 with zero coverage. Verified after the fact: portfolio-optimiser now has no ERROR, and the commons repo measures as WARN with 9 checks passed.

Fixed

• LINK-DEAD/LINK-NON-REPO false negative on a schemaless host. URL_REF required :// or @host:, so git.fromaitochitta.com/open/<name> — the form a subtree instruction routinely uses — resolved to nothing at all (measured: llm-security/V3-UPGRADE.md:343). What makes a name resolvable is its position after a host, not the scheme in front of it. Two guards keep the widening from becoming noise: the host must end in a TLD-shaped label, and a candidate preceded by / is a path segment that merely contains a dot, not a host — so docs/v1.2/open/ and test/nav.golden/open/ stay silent, and the API-endpoint rule from 0.3.0 is untouched. Measured before shipping across 1501 tracked Markdown files in 20 local clones: 14 lines changed verdict, 13 of them references that were previously invisible.
• The 14th was a defect the widening introduced, caught by that same measurement and fixed here: a markdown link whose display text repeats its own URL matched on both halves, which prints one dead reference twice and inflates the count the new OK line offers as evidence. References are now deduplicated per name-and-line — two different names on one line, or the same name on two lines, still count as two.

[0.3.0] — 2026-08-04

Added

• BADGE-DEAD-LINK: a linked badge making a run claim ("tests", "build", "CI", "passing") is now resolved against the repo's tracked files when the link target is relative. Being wrapped in a link previously ended all scrutiny — the link-target capture group was missing from the regex outright, so a badge linked to a dead relative path passed silently. External targets (the ordinary case — a CI provider) still need the network and stay out of scope, same precedent as checkInternalLinks.

Fixed

• LINK-DEAD false positive on API endpoint paths: URL_REF matched open/<name> anywhere in a URL, so a Forgejo API call like .../api/v1/orgs/open/repos read as a dead reference to a repo named "repos". open must now be the first path segment after the host, matching how every real repo URL is shaped. Measured twice against the catalog's own RUNBOOK.md.
• 429 backoff was tuned for a hard IP ban that does not exist. Measured directly against the live forge: nginx never sends Retry-After (the branch handling it is dead code in practice), the limit is a leaky bucket that can take up to ~15s to drain, and it is IP-based rather than token-quota-based — a valid token made no difference. fetchWithRetry now defaults to a 23s worst-case budget (retries: 5, maxDelayMs: 8000), up from 7s. CLAUDE.md's "13 calls in a loop" explanation corrected to match.
• Two tests asserted facts about their own local test fixture instead of the real register/repos.json — a typo in the real register would have drifted past them silently. Both now read the live register via loadRegister().

[0.2.2] — 2026-08-04

Fixed

• The engine never printed its own version, which is how a stale plugin cache went unnoticed: two repos independently proved the /repo-standard skill had resolved ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT} to a cached 0.1.1 while 0.2.0 was installed and the catalog pinned it — same instruction, wrong engine, and 0.1.1 has neither BADGE-COUNT nor README-LANGUAGE, so the run looked clean instead of incomplete. The header line and --json output now both carry repo-standard v<version>; SKILL.md tells the reader to confirm it against the catalog pin before trusting a green result. The cache resolution itself is the harness's, not this repo's, and is not fixed here.

[0.2.1] — 2026-08-04

Fixed

• The gate makes two anonymous forge calls per invocation (org listing + catalog marketplace.json), not one — this repo's own CLAUDE.md said "one" from before INSTALL-TRUTH added the second, and stayed wrong long enough that a 13-repo shell loop trusted the count and tripped an HTTP 429 at 26 requests. Both calls now go through fetchWithRetry, which honors Retry-After and retries instead of silently reporting SKIP on a transient rate limit. CLAUDE.md corrected to match.

0.2.0 — 2026-08-04

Added

Two presentation checks, both from adversarially-verified research rather than taste — docs/presentation-research-2026-08-03.md records what the evidence supports and, more usefully, what it refuses to support.

• BADGE-COUNT (WARN) — more than five badges. Trockman et al., ICSE 2018 (n=294,941 npm packages) measured a non-linear relationship with popularity inflecting at five, motivated by surveyed maintainers calling over-badged READMEs cluttered and "trying too hard". WARN and never ERROR: the coefficient sits in an appendix without CI or p-value, so it carries "more is not better" and cannot carry a hard limit. Counting uses a narrower rule than the existing claim check — a screenshot or architecture diagram must not be counted as clutter. Measured: 8 of 18 open/ repos are past it.
• README-LANGUAGE (WARN) — the prose is not in the language this repo's readers were declared to speak, via a new locales axis in the register. English is the default; ms-ai-architect and okr are declared nb as Norway-only in audience. Detection is a stopword-frequency comparison over prose with code stripped, so a Norwegian flag name in a shell example cannot decide the document. Evenly bilingual prose is a SKIP — the question is live and unanswered. No running prose is an OK: nothing claims a language, and a thin README is checkFirstScreen's business. Measured: fires on exactly the two declared repos, silent on all sixteen English ones.

Deliberately not built, because the evidence does not reach: any rule about images, diagrams, screenshots or terminal recordings (every such claim was refuted 0-3); a README length bound (no evidence-based target exists); a section count (would fire on 9 of 18 — textbook "suspect the CHECK"); Mermaid source length and #gh-dark-mode-only (zero occurrences, and the instance's actual limit is not readable via the API, so any threshold would be a guess).

Changed

• The skill now carries diagram guidance, deliberately as judgement and not as a check. Mermaid is verified to render on this forge; that is capability, not justification, and every claim that visuals improve a README was refuted. What the guidance covers is a diagram that already exists — height, node labels, the silent degradation past MERMAID_MAX_SOURCE_CHARACTERS, and the fact that #gh-dark-mode-only is unavailable below Gitea 1.26.0. The org's own measured example renders at 1,459 px and wraps node text mid-word while its neighbour sits at 191 px: rendering and rendering well are separate questions.

0.1.3 — 2026-08-03

Fixed

Three more measured false positives, all reported via coord the same day 0.1.2 shipped, from repos running the gate for the first time.

• extractChangelogTop truncated a PEP 440 pre-release (0.5.0a2) to 0.5.0, so VERSION-CHANGELOG disagreed with VERSION-TAG — which compares the untruncated tag and does not have this problem — over a version the manifest and the tag already agreed on. Reported by llm-ingestion-okf with a repro. An affected repo could reach 0 ERROR only by lying about its version; now the pre-release suffix is kept.
• BADGE-STATIC-CLAIM treated a bare status badge (status-alpha, status-experimental) as a run claim, the same as tests-34-passing. A self-declared maturity label asserts no run — the same class as version, licence and platform, already exempt. Reported by llm-ingestion-pipeline-security. build/ci/passing still catch the run-asserting compounds ("build status", "CI status"); only the bare word is dropped.
• BOILERPLATE flagged a bare FIXME even when it named the convention rather than an instance of it — a scanner's own docs describing what it detects ("Flag TODO/FIXME markers…", a table row listing "TODO/FIXME comments" as a finding type) read the same as a forgotten marker. Reported by config-audit, whose product literally is a marker scanner. "TODO/FIXME" named together is now read as the convention; a lone FIXME is still caught.

0.1.2 — 2026-08-03

Fixed

• checkInternalLinks compared a link's resolved target only against present — the set of tracked files — so a link to a directory ([x](dir/)) was reported LINK-INTERNAL-MISSING even when every file under that directory was tracked. A directory was never a member of that set to begin with. Reported by portfolio-optimiser-claude (coord 20260803T194933Z) with a minimal repro; confirmed and traced to the same defect in voyage, linkedin-studio and portfolio-optimiser — 12 of the 71 ERROR findings measured across the org on 2026-08-03 were this one check, not twelve separate repo problems. Fixed by deriving the set of directories that actually contain a tracked file from present itself, and letting a link that resolves to one of them pass.

0.1.1 — 2026-08-03

Documentation only. No behaviour change: scripts/ and register/ are unchanged from 0.1.0 — this release carries version strings and the correction below.

Fixed

• The 0.1.0 entry said the gate has eleven checks. It has twelve, which is what both the code and the README table already said. The entry is corrected in place, and this release exists so the catalog's pinned tag serves the corrected text instead of the wrong count. The count is drift of exactly the kind this plugin was built to catch, and it was sitting in the plugin's own repository.

0.1.0 — 2026-07-27

First release. Covers the checks that a single repository can answer on its own.

Added

• The gate (scripts/repo-standard-check.mjs) — pure classifiers with all I/O resolved into their input, findings tagged ERROR/WARN/SKIP/OK, exit 1 on ERROR. Twelve checks: README first screen, install block, install truth, required headings, files required by the repo's class and traits, open/<name> references, relative links, licence claim, badges, boilerplate, version consistency and description length.
• Taxonomy register (register/repos.json) — one central file mapping each repository to its class, plus the per-class file and install requirements. --refresh compares it against the live org listing.
• Three-outcome reference check — "matches no repository" (ERROR) is a separate finding from "matches something that is deliberately not a repository" (WARN). Sharing an outcome would let real dead links hide among correct text. Only names in URL position are treated as references; the .git suffix is normalised first.
• Two-axis findings — every ERROR/WARN carries a bucket alongside its level: broken (a stranger is blocked or misled), missing (an expected artefact is absent), weakening (present, but it reads as amateur). Output is grouped by bucket, because that is the order findings get acted on.
• Traits, a second axis beside class — class is structural and readable off the catalog; a trait is about what the code does. security attaches a SECURITY.md requirement and a ## Known limitations section.
• Required README headings per class — ## Install, ## Non-goals, ## Changelog. A heading present at the wrong depth is its own finding, not "missing".
• In-repo version consistency — manifest, README version badge, newest CHANGELOG entry and the git tag must agree. An untagged repo SKIPs the tag comparison rather than failing it.
• Badge honesty — a static badge asserting a test, build or coverage run is a claim dressed as evidence. Version, licence and platform badges assert no run and are fine.
• Install truth, not just install syntax — the marketplace URL in the install block must be the real one (offline, against the register), and the plugin must actually be pinned in the catalog (one call; SKIP if unreachable). A perfectly formed claude plugin install x@mkt fails silently when x was never pinned, and that is the single most disqualifying thing a repo can publish.
• Boilerplate, licence-claim and relative-link checks.
• The skill (skills/repo-standard/) — the judgement the script cannot encode: what a description should say, why the summary card must never be used to verify one, what not to retrofit, and where the per-repo boundary is.
• Link level follows the reader. A dead relative link in a root document — README, CHANGELOG, SECURITY — is an ERROR: it is in the shop window. The same link below the root is a WARN. Measured across seventeen repositories: 30 of 43 findings sat in shared/, docs/plan/ and .claude/ — session plans, agent working files, and path-traversal test fixtures whose targets are invalid on purpose. All 30 were ERRORs, which is how a gate gets switched off. Only the level moves; every finding is still reported with its file and line.
• The repo name comes from the remote, not the directory. catalog/ is the working directory of the repo named ktg-plugin-marketplace. Reading the basename left it REPO-UNREGISTERED with zero checks run — against the one repo every catalog rule depends on. The scp form the forge's clone button hands out is handled, and a bare host is not a repo name.
• 84 tests over the pure classifiers, using measured false positives as reference fixtures.

Notes

• Descriptions are measured in codepoints — not bytes, and not UTF-16 units. The same string measures 248 / 249 / 253 across those three yardsticks when it contains an astral character.
• enabledPlugins in settings.json is treated as a legitimate second install form. The gate requires a CLI command as well, and never reports the JSON form as the defect.
• Two network calls, both anonymous: the org listing and the catalog manifest. Per-repo fetching trips the forge's rate limiter, so neither is ever done per repository. --offline skips both, and the checks that needed them report SKIP rather than passing.
• CONTRIBUTING.md, CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md and MAINTAINERS.md are required by no class: the project is solo-maintained and publishes that stance. This is not a rule against having them — files already present are a cleanup decision, not a gate finding. SECURITY.md is unaffected; it exists for the outsider who finds a hole.
• There is no CI badge because there is no CI: the forge has no Actions runner registered. The substitute is one command from a clean clone, stated honestly. A badge asserting the test count would be the very anti-pattern the gate flags, and an earlier draft of this README carried exactly that.
• The link and boilerplate checks ignore fenced blocks and inline code spans. Documentation about regexes and placeholders is full of text that is a markdown link to a naive scanner — the first version produced about thirty findings against a real repository and every one was noise.
• Relative links resolve against the file they appear in, not the repo root.
• Indented text counts as a code block only when a blank line opens it, and then continues while the indent holds. The first rule alone made links inside nested list items invisible; the second alone let everything after a block's first line leak back in. Both were silent false passes, which is worse than noise — the second was caught by the gate on this plugin's own SKILL.md.
• A README H1 that differs from the repo name is a WARN, not an ERROR. The thread that has to hold is description == catalog == opening line, and the H1 is none of those three; a human title is a naming choice the operator owns. A missing H1 is still an ERROR.
• No hook ships in this release. A blocking gate has to be precise enough not to fail a correct repository first.