community.general

Give every collection dependency you declare in `galaxy.yml` an upper or pinned bound — `<`, `<=`, `==` or `~=` — so that installing your collection cannot silently pull in an arbitrary future release of somebody else’s. If your collection declares no dependencies at all this rule already awards full marks and there is nothing here to change. If we reported a dependency we could not read, the fix is the syntax of its version range rather than the dependency itself.

Ship a `changelogs/changelog.yaml` — the structured form `antsibull-changelog` generates and the `ansible` package consumes — rather than only a hand-maintained `CHANGELOG.md`, and write a fragment into `changelogs/fragments/` as each change lands rather than reconstructing release notes at release time. Both have to be inside the published tarball to be observable: a changelog that lives only in your Git repository is one we cannot read. This is the single highest-leverage change for most collections, because the same missing file is what holds down both changelog rules in this rubric. If you already publish `changelog.yaml` with fragments, this rule is answered.

Declare a machine-readable SPDX identifier in `galaxy.yml`’s `license` field rather than relying on a `LICENSE` file alone: an identifier is what a consuming organisation’s policy tooling reads without a human opening the file. A `LICENSES/` directory following REUSE ranks above a bare root licence file and below the identifier. One exception worth stating: we record the identifier you publish rather than validating it against the SPDX list, so a wrong identifier will earn these marks and mislead your users at the same time — if no SPDX identifier fits your licence, publish the file instead.

Publish your CI configuration inside the artifact. `.github/workflows/` is what we count most precisely, and other CI config files earn partial credit when your automation runs somewhere we cannot enumerate as exactly. `build_ignore` commonly strips `.github/`, again on the packaging documentation’s own advice, so an absence here is a gap in what we could read rather than a statement that your collection has no CI. In this scoring version this rule can only add points: an unobserved CI signal leaves your calculation rather than scoring zero, so this is worth doing for the credit and never to avoid a deduction.