Implements the operator intent: "CI/CD pipeline is the end-all-be-all for approval. If
the CI pipeline is not good enough to be trusted for this, then it is not good enough to
do its intended job and needs to be improved. Manual approvers should only be for
architecturally or security relevant changes."
Adds ci/approval-policy.sh as a gate stage. A green gate becomes sufficient for an
ordinary change; the one exception is structural rather than a matter of taste:
A CHANGE TO THE GATE CANNOT BE GATED BY THE GATE.
A PR that weakens a check would be approved by the weakened check. The same holds for the
admission policies, the Flux wiring that decides what reconciles, the SOPS recipients and
the RBAC. Those paths -- and only those -- still require an APPROVED review from someone
other than the author.
The list is data with a reason per entry (infra/gitea/approval-policy.json) and is itself
a sensitive path, so the policy cannot be widened or narrowed without a human.
FAIL-CLOSED, and deliberately the opposite of gitea-settings. There, a missing credential
must not block every PR -- that is a lock-out. Here, a missing credential would let an
unreviewed change to the gate merge, so "cannot evaluate" is a BLOCK.
Verified against real PRs rather than fixtures:
PR #16 (sensitive paths, approved by jakman85, author gitea-admin) -> PASS
PR #6 (.gitea/workflows/gate.yml, ZERO reviews) -> BLOCK, naming the file
push event (not a PR) -> N/A, exit 0
bogus token -> BLOCK, not skip
Also caught before shipping: the first draft passed the PR file list with a second stdin
redirect after a heredoc, which silently wins and leaves the script body unread. Running
it found that; reading it would not have.
required_approvals is NOT changed here. Flipping it live must happen together with the
declaration in expected-branch-protection.json, or gitea-settings correctly fails on the
drift -- that is a separate, deliberate change.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
jakman85andClaude Opus 5