sign-off-the-house-waylisted

# 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). - [ ] **A