proposal: restore existing trusted committer policy to cordis #620

Historical blocker

Task 3B PRs #618 and #619 pass their owner verification but the existing base-owned AGPL authorization workflow fails: exact cordis base 72e410ae2e4edb0be4fd6e1d7d5005bfc7b63866 has no .github/approved-committers.json. The approved initializer exported its bounded setup allowlist and original AGPL LICENSE, but omitted this repository policy. No permission change or bypass has been made.

The existing policy at both original staging c8e18e22f322f33550726bfe65aa79c889307f2b and current main is exact Git blob b1a687db754ee2fac141919e6c63052d12bf2812; it binds repository treeseed-ai/api and already approves the provider-authenticated author adrianwebb. Restoring those exact existing bytes would preserve authority rather than add a committer. The workflow reads the BASE, so adding it only to a feature head cannot repair that feature's gate. A reviewed maintainer-directed baseline policy restoration/admission path is required before either runtime PR may merge.

Maintainer-authorized remediation

• Maintainer approves an exact-byte restoration of the existing policy onto cordis through a separately reviewed change and defines how the initial missing-base-policy admission is verified without treating feature-head data as trusted.
• Confirm the policy blob remains b1a687db754ee2fac141919e6c63052d12bf2812 and introduces no username/license/permission change.
• Rerun feat: add native API container provider and service definition (#617) #618/feat: compose authenticated installed API and request roots (#617) #619 against the updated verified cordis base; require actual authorization and owner verification green.
• Add a separately reviewed initializer preflight for required base-owned repository policies so this omission is caught before publishing future cleared baselines.

Pattern/cost: source/build tests passed while PR admission could not run, forcing late delivery triage. Cheapest prevention: check mandatory base-owned policy files during initialization preflight, preserving exact existing authorization bytes with explicit review rather than discovering missing authority only after PR creation. Parent treeseed-ai/platform#713; setup #616. Keep this and all migration issues open until release. No change to legacy staging/main, protections or approved committers is authorized here.

Verified restoration

The maintainer explicitly authorized restoration in this chat. PR #621 restored exact blob b1a687db754ee2fac141919e6c63052d12bf2812 and merged to cordis at 8b19a12. Its initial absent-base-policy exception was confined to this exact restoration, verified against already-trusted staging/main bytes and human authority. No approved identity, license, workflow, protection or permission was changed. #618 and #619 now include the restored trusted base and pass normal authorization, metadata and owner verification. The restoration task branch was deleted after merged/head/remote verification.

The final initializer-preflight proposal remains unchecked and requires its own separately reviewed process implementation; this task did not alter the initializer. Keep #620 open under release policy.