D79 — Open source release: Apache-2.0, GitHub, release-please, GoReleaser, ghcr, Homebrew tap

Status: implemented (2026-07-18).

Context. The project lived on a private Gitea with an internal deploy-only CI (private registry + homelab-manifests bump). Publishing it required choices on license, hosting, history, pipeline, distribution and language.

Decision.

a) License: Apache-2.0 (replacing MIT pre-publication, single author — a plain commit). No NOTICE, no per-file headers, no CLA (inbound = outbound) and no dual licensing: anyone, including the author's employer, may use, modify, close and monetize freely.

b) Hosting: GitHub (github.com/BeppeTemp/cartographer) as the only source of truth. The public history starts from a single squashed commit (feat: initial public release); the internal history remains readable on the archived (read-only) Gitea repo. The pre-existing version (2.1.2) lives only in the release-please manifest, not as tags.

c) Pipeline: GitHub Actions — ci.yml (required test check + pr-title conventional-commit lint), release-please.yml (release PR with semver bump computed from conventional commits; merge ⇒ tag + GitHub Release; needs the RELEASE_PLEASE_TOKEN fine-grained PAT so pull_request workflows trigger on the bot's PR), release.yml (GoReleaser: 4 binaries + sha256sums.txt, Homebrew cask pushed to BeppeTemp/homebrew-tap via HOMEBREW_TAP_TOKEN, multi-arch image on ghcr.io/beppetemp/cartographer). Both PATs are fine-grained and scoped to a single repo each.

d) Main protection: ruleset with mandatory PRs (0 approvals — CI is the review), required test check, no force-push/delete, no admin bypass; squash-merge only (the PR title becomes the commit on main that release-please reads). Daily consequence: no direct commits to main in this repo.

e) Language: English everywhere (docs, Go comments, e2e fixtures, project CLAUDE.md, skills); future plans and D entries are written in English. User-facing pages were reoriented to external users in the same pass (new docs/getting-started.md, two reading paths in docs/index.md).

f) Homelab downstream: the cluster consumes the public ghcr.io image (manifest bump in homelab-manifests, Flux reconciliation); the operator release procedure (deploy skill) moved out of the repo into the maintainer's local, unversioned tooling. First public release: v2.2.0.

Rationale. One pipeline instead of two (public release + private deploy were redundant); release-please removes per-release semver judgment; the squashed history avoids exposing internal timestamps while keeping the archive consultable; Homebrew via personal tap because homebrew-core is precluded to new projects (notability thresholds).