HSF Affiliation¶
The path to HSF affiliation — endorsement by the HEP Software Foundation Steering Group under its affiliated-projects process — and the mapping of every required guideline to the place in this repository where it is satisfied. Affiliation is valid for five years, after which the evaluation is reviewed for continuation.
Required-Guideline Checklist Mapping¶
The HSF's general guidelines are required for affiliation. Each one maps to a satisfying artifact in this repository:
| Required guideline | Where hep-metadex satisfies it |
|---|---|
| Public repository — code accessible in anonymous read-only mode | github.com/DUNE/hep-metadex, publicly readable; the OpenSpec Store is consumed read-only by exactly that mode |
| A suitable name — conveys what the project is about; no pre-existing trademarks | hep-metadex — high-energy physics metadata management reference; deliberately org-neutral so the name survives a hosting move (ADR-0002) |
| Licensing — an open-source license attached | Apache-2.0, full text in LICENSE — a deliberate divergence from the template's MIT, chosen for the explicit patent grant and contribution terms a cross-institution standards artifact needs (ADR-0004), recorded in the divergence manifest |
| Installation — instructions trivial to find; standard procedure | The README quick start: install the OpenSpec CLI (pinned version), register the store, install the workflow scaffolding, declare the Store reference, openspec doctor green. Detailed in setup.md, including the agent-assisted bootstrap |
| Documentation — suitably documented; a user's guide at least as a quick start, highlighted | The README is the adopter front door (what/why + quick start + repository map); docs/ covers setup, usage, governance, and maintaining; glossary/ anchors terminology; and the documentation site publishes it all at dune.github.io/hep-metadex |
| Test suite — comprehensively tested; coverage encouraged and displayed | Spec-validation CI (.github/workflows/validate.yml) runs openspec validate over all specs and changes on every push and pull request, gating on valid: true (ADR-0003) — the honest reading of a test suite for a zero-runtime specification repository, verified to fail on invalid artifacts. Runtime test coverage arrives with the first runtime change, scaffolded against the acceptance suite |
| Open to contributors — contributions encouraged; pull requests never disabled | CONTRIBUTING.md — an org-agnostic policy; pull requests are open to any GitHub user, cross-org writes included (ADR-0002) |
| Issue tracking — an issue tracker with anonymous view of open and closed tickets | GitHub issues, publicly viewable; one issue per change, tracking the change's entire lifecycle (usage.md) |
| General information — dependencies, supported platforms, and similar | The repository map describes the layout; the maintainer toolchain is Python 3.14 managed by uv (pinned interpreter, no runtime code) for maintaining this repository itself; adopting repositories are unconstrained by it — their single tool dependency remains the OpenSpec CLI (pinned 1.16.0 — see usage.md) |
The Affiliation Path¶
Recorded in ADR-0002:
- Incubation in the DUNE GitHub organization while internal reviews greenlight the approach and adoption evidence accumulates.
- HSF Steering Group endorsement — the affiliation event. An evaluator walks the checklist above; this document is the review map, and governance.md records decision rights and the review bar behind it.
- HSF-organization hosting remains a separate, optional, mutually agreed follow-on — affiliation does not imply it.
Applicability Beyond One Experiment¶
The store's mandate is to serve experiment metadata management across high-energy physics, not one collaboration. The mechanism-level evidence:
- The two-channel design — specs shared read-only through the OpenSpec Store, workflow scaffolding installed by template — was proven by the first adoption: dune-metadex bootstrapped from a bare repository to a connected experiment repository (ADR-0001, setup.md).
- Adoption touches only the adopting repository plus one
references:block — no change to the store, no experiment relocation (ADR-0001). - Additional experiments (EIC, sPHENIX) follow the same path without store changes; the org-neutral id and governance text keep the door open regardless of hosting.