golangci-lint v2.12.0 deprecated gomodguard, and `linters.default: all`
enables it, so every lint run in every consuming Go repo prints a
deprecation warning. Disable the old name, which is what silences the
warning; name gomodguard_v2 in linters.enable so the settings block has
a visible owner; give it a blocked module list.
The block list restates only decisions already recorded in the Go
package defaults: zerolog, the pre-fork go-redis/redis, sergi/go-diff
and hexops/gotextdiff. Recorded rejections that repos vendoring this
file still require are deliberately absent, so a re-vendor cannot
redden a repo that has done nothing wrong.
SPECULATIVE and ahead of your ruling — nothing here is urgent and closing it costs nothing. One sentence of policy prose changed; no config file is touched.
## The contradiction
`REPO_POLICIES.md` line 266 currently reads:
> `.golangci.yml` is standardized and must _NEVER_ be modified by an agent, only manually by the user.
Stated unqualified, that forbids an agent from modifying `.golangci.yml` **anywhere** — including the canonical copy in this repo, which is the only place it can ever be fixed. An agent that wants to remediate a linter problem must either violate the rule or leave the problem standing. A rule that cannot be complied with and satisfied at the same time gets resolved ad hoc, differently by each reader, which is the worst of both outcomes it was trying to produce.
This is not hypothetical. It has already cost real time:
- The `gomodguard` deprecation (#25) has been open since 2026-08-07 and still prints on every lint run in every consuming Go repo.
- One agent read the rule as binding here and **declined to open even a speculative branch**, so the fix was not written at all on that pass.
- #47 exists only because a later request was explicit enough to override the reading, and its lead comment asks for exactly this ruling before the PR itself can be judged on its merits.
- The same warning is refiled downstream as sneak/homoicon#4, where it is correctly marked owner-only and correctly punted upstream.
Each new agent that meets the rule reruns this whole argument.
## The change
Scope the prohibition to the vendored copy, and name the one legitimate path by which the config can change:
```
- `.golangci.yml` is standardized. The vendored copy in a consuming repo must
_NEVER_ be modified by an agent: fetch it from
`https://git.eeqj.de/sneak/prompts/raw/branch/main/.golangci.yml` and keep it
byte-identical, so that no repo can quietly loosen its own linting. Linter
configuration changes are made to the canonical copy in the `prompts` repo and
reach consuming repos by re-vendoring; an agent may open a PR against
canonical, which only the user merges.
```
The version pin sentence that followed is unchanged.
This keeps the property the rule exists for — no repo silently weakens its own linting, and divergence from canonical stays detectable — while removing the reading that freezes canonical itself. Your control is not reduced: an agent may open a PR here, and only you merge it.
## Scope of the wording sweep
I grepped every `.md` in the repo for the absolute phrasing. It appears in **exactly one place**, `prompts/REPO_POLICIES.md` lines 266-267.
`EXISTING_REPO_CHECKLIST.md` (line 39) and `NEW_REPO_CHECKLIST.md` (line 63) both mention `.golangci.yml`, but only as "fetch from `https://git.eeqj.de/sneak/prompts/raw/branch/main/.golangci.yml`" — an instruction to vendor canonical verbatim, which is exactly what the scoped rule says. Neither carries a prohibition, so neither needs changing and neither is left contradicting the other. `REPO_POLICIES.md` line 414 lists `.golangci.yml` as a required file, also unaffected.
Note that the repo-root `REPO_POLICIES.md` is a symlink to `prompts/REPO_POLICIES.md`, so the single edit covers both paths.
## Deliberately NOT included
This PR does **not** change `.golangci.yml`. The `gomodguard` fix stays in #47 so the two can be judged separately — the policy question is worth settling on its own terms regardless of what you decide about that config change, and merging them would collapse two decisions into one.
## Unrelated observation, for the record
While verifying #47 against a scratch `sneak/homoicon` clone, I found that homoicon's vendored `.golangci.yml` is sha256 `391ea68e637432980f1db0776076f51578fa58193bbd17f4b40ad725975e21f8`, while canonical `main` is `021cc83f4e6fc7c31b95b34b846723dfcf20b66b7baeea1dc40406e643346bcb`. The whole difference is a three-line comment recording a one-time agent edit you authorized on 2026-08-07; the config is functionally identical.
That matters only if you ever want a hash-based drift guard against canonical, which #25 floats as an offline alternative to `golangci-lint config verify`: such a guard would already report homoicon as drifted on day one. Worth knowing before building one. No change proposed here.
## Validation
`make check` passes (`prettier --check '**/*.md' --tab-width 4 --prose-wrap always`: all matched files clean). `make fmt` produced no further changes. `last_modified` in the front matter updated to 2026-08-19 per this file's own rule.
Co-authored-by: sneak <sneak@sneak.berlin>
Co-authored-by: Jeffrey Paul <sneak@noreply.example.org>
Reviewed-on: #49
Co-authored-by: clawbot <clawbot@noreply.example.org>
Co-committed-by: clawbot <clawbot@noreply.example.org>
Codifies your ruling (2026-08-30, filed as homoicon issue 555): no project logic outside `internal/` or `pkg/`; each `cmd/<name>/` is a single `main.go` whose body is one call into library code.
- `CODE_STYLEGUIDE_GO.md`: strengthens the "keep `main` small" rule to the single-call form and adds the no-logic-outside-`internal/`-or-`pkg/` rule.
- `REPO_POLICIES.md`: annotates `cmd/` in the canonical subdirectory list accordingly. (Root copy is a symlink; one edit covers both.)
Co-authored-by: sneak <sneak@sneak.berlin>
Reviewed-on: #54
Co-authored-by: clawbot <clawbot@noreply.example.org>
Co-committed-by: clawbot <clawbot@noreply.example.org>
## The question this answers
Is the 60-second test-time cap the new **org-wide** ceiling, or an approved
**dnswatcher-only** divergence?
- Question: #41
- Origin: sneak/dnswatcher#93
This PR implements **org-wide**.
## The ruling
On sneak/dnswatcher#93 (comment) (2026-08-09),
verbatim:
> make the cap 60s in both and never use mocking, always use live resolvers and
> assume the build and run environments have full unmodified unrestricted
> internet access. it is ok if they fail due to a bad build environment that
> alters dns packets.
And on #41 (comment), disambiguating
the scope:
> org wide. the hard cap is 60 for ci/green, but over 20s should be filed as an
> improvement bug.
That second comment landed after this work was started, and it confirms the
option implemented here. The two-tier shape it describes (60s hard, 20s target,
overage filed as a bug) is encoded in the policy text.
## What changed, and the number chosen
The backstop moves from `30s` to **`90s`**.
The old pairing was incoherent under the new cap: a 60-second ceiling with a
30-second `-timeout` means the timeout kills the suite long before the ceiling
is reached, so the ceiling would never be the thing that fails. The backstop has
to sit above the cap, where it does its actual job of catching a hung test
rather than a merely slow one. `90s` preserves the 1.5x backstop-to-cap ratio
the old `20s`/`30s` pair already had, so the relationship between the two
numbers is unchanged and only the scale moves.
Every place a number changed:
| File | What |
| --- | --- |
| `prompts/REPO_POLICIES.md` | Prose ceiling: `20 seconds` to `60 seconds`, plus the new 20s target / improvement-bug tier |
| `prompts/REPO_POLICIES.md` | Backstop prose: `30-second timeout` to `90-second timeout`, with the rationale for why it exceeds the cap |
| `prompts/REPO_POLICIES.md` | Go example Makefile snippet, first run: `go test -timeout 30s` to `-timeout 90s` |
| `prompts/REPO_POLICIES.md` | Go example Makefile snippet, verbose rerun: `go test -timeout 30s` to `-timeout 90s` |
| `prompts/EXISTING_REPO_CHECKLIST.md` | `make test` has a `30-second` timeout, to `90-second` timeout plus the 60s hard cap and the 20s filing rule |
| `prompts/NEW_REPO_CHECKLIST.md` | `script/test` / `make test` entrypoint line: `30-second timeout` to `90-second timeout, 60-second hard cap on wall time` |
I swept the whole repo for `20 second`, `30-second`, `20s`, `30s`, `timeout 20`,
`timeout 30`, and `under 20`/`under 30`. After this change the only remaining
occurrences of `20` in a test-timing context are the two intentional references
to the new 20-second target. The other `timeout` hits in the repo are unrelated
(`.golangci.yml` lint timeout, HTTP server `ReadTimeout`/`WriteTimeout` examples,
`middleware.Timeout`) and were left alone.
One deliberate non-change: the Python example Makefile snippet in
`prompts/REPO_POLICIES.md` carries no timeout flag today and still carries none.
`pytest` has no built-in timeout, so adding one would mean mandating the
`pytest-timeout` plugin org-wide, which is a new dependency requirement rather
than a renumbering, and outside what was ruled on. It is a pre-existing gap
between the prose and that snippet, not one this PR introduces. Happy to file it
separately or add `--timeout=90` here if you want it in scope.
## The alternative that was not implemented
**Keep canonical at 20s and let `sneak/dnswatcher` carry a documented per-repo
divergence.** That was the recommendation originally written up in
#41, on the reasoning that the 20s
ceiling is doing real work in repos with fast deterministic suites and only
dnswatcher needs the headroom.
Org-wide was chosen instead for two reasons. First, the pressure is not specific
to DNS: any repo whose tests exercise real infrastructure over the network
inherits the same variance, and there is no principled line that admits
dnswatcher and excludes the next such repo. Second, and more decisively,
`REPO_POLICIES.md` is a vendored file. A sanctioned per-repo divergence in a
vendored file is indistinguishable, on inspection, from a stale vendored copy:
the next re-vendoring silently reverts the divergence, and nobody reading a
consuming repo can tell whether the number they are looking at is an intentional
exception or drift. That is the bidirectional-drift problem already tracked in
#31. The two-tier cap gets the same
outcome without the drift, since a fast repo that regresses from 4s to 45s still
generates an improvement bug.
## Status
This PR was opened speculatively, ahead of a decision, on the standing "open it
rather than wait" instruction. The scope question has since been answered
org-wide in the issue, but the specific backstop value of `90s` and the two-tier
wording are still my proposals rather than anything ruled on, so closing this or
sending it back for a different number is a perfectly fine outcome.
`make check` passes; `make fmt` was run and the result is included (it was a
no-op, the edits were already prettier-conformant).
`sneak/dnswatcher` is landing the matching 60s edit to its vendored copy in
parallel, and will match whichever way this is decided.
Co-authored-by: clawbot <clawbot@eeqj.de>
Reviewed-on: #42
Co-authored-by: clawbot <clawbot@noreply.example.org>
Co-committed-by: clawbot <clawbot@noreply.example.org>
2026-08-10 16:13:31 +02:00
6 changed files with 69 additions and 20 deletions
- `docs/` — documentation and markdown (README.md stays in root)
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