Homebrew/homebrew-core Merge Checklist

The following checklist is intended to help maintainers decide on whether to merge, request changes or close a PR. It also brings more transparency for contributors in addition to Acceptable Formulae requirements.

This is a guiding principle. As a maintainer, you can make a call to either request changes from a contributor or help them out based on their comfort and previous contributions. Remember, as a team we Prioritise Maintainers Over Users to avoid burnout.

This is a more practical checklist; it should be used after you get familiar with Maintainer Guidelines.

Checklist

Check for:

  • previously opened active PRs, as we would like to be fair to contributors who came first
  • patches/inreplace that have been applied to upstream and can be removed
  • comments in formula around url, as we do skip some versions (for example vim or v8)
  • vendored resources that need updates (for example emscripten)
  • vendored dependencies (for example certbot)
  • stable/announced release
    • some teams use odd minor release number for tests and even for stable releases
    • other teams drop new version with minor release 0 but promote it to stable only after a few minor releases
    • if the software uses only hosted version control (such as GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket), the release should be tagged and if upstream marks latest/pre-releases, PR must use latest
  • does changelog mention addition/removal of dependency and is it addressed in the PR
  • commits
    • contain one formula change per commit
      • ask author to squash
      • rebase during merge
    • version update follows preferred message format for simple version updates: foobar 7.3
    • other fixes format is foobar: fix flibble matrix
  • bottle block is not removed

    Suggested reply:

    Please keep bottle block in place, [@BrewTestBot](https://github.com/BrewTestBot) takes care of it.
  • is there a test block for other than checking version or printing help? Consider asking to add one
  • if CI failed
    • due to test block - paste relevant lines and add test failure label
    • due to build errors - paste relevant lines and add build failure label
    • due to other formulae needing revision bumps - suggest to use the following command:
      # in this example PR is for `libuv` formula and `urbit` needs revision bump
      brew bump-revision --message 'for libuv' urbit
      • make sure it is one commit per revision bump
  • if CI is green and…
    • formula bottle :unneeded, you can merge it through GitHub UI
    • bottles need to be pulled, and…
      • the commits are correct, don’t need changes, and BrewTestBot can merge it (doesn’t have the label automerge-skip): approve the PR to trigger an automatic merge (use brew pr-publish $PR_ID to trigger manually in case of a new formula)
      • the commits are correct and don’t need changes, but BrewTestBot can’t merge it (has the label automerge-skip), use brew pr-publish $PR_ID
      • the commits need to be amended, use brew pr-pull $PR_ID, make changes, and git push
  • don’t forget to thank the contributor
    • celebrate the first-time contributors
  • suggest to use brew bump-formula-pr next time if this was not the case

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https://docs.brew.sh/Homebrew-homebrew-core-Merge-Checklist