Single Mainline Governance for Any-Language Repositories

Purpose

Make main the single long-lived branch used for integration and release, while preserving safety through review, tests, ownership, and runtime release controls.

The intended result is not “everyone commits anything directly to production.” The intended result is:

• small changes
• short-lived review branches when needed
• fast integration into main
• required checks before merge
• no long-lived develop, staging, qa, or release/* branches as integration backlogs
• unfinished behavior hidden behind release controls
• AI-generated PRs entering the same queue as human PRs, with clear ownership and review gates

Preconditions

Run deployless-audit first. Do not apply this skill blindly. The audit should identify: