OpenAirframes/AGENTS.md

Never interpolate ${{ github.event.* }} into a run: block

Actions substitutes ${{ }} as raw text before the shell parses it, and issue bodies here are public and unauthenticated. Pass untrusted values through env: and quote them.

A quoted heredoc delimiter does not save you: the body can contain the delimiter, close the heredoc early, and execute every line after it. validate-community-submission.yaml had that shape. Never fix this class of bug by escaping, sanitizing, or renaming the delimiter — move it to env:.

Run everything from the repo root

src/create_daily_faa_release.py and src/create_daily_tc_release.py must be invoked as scripts (python src/create_daily_faa_release.py). They use bare sibling imports, so -m raises ModuleNotFoundError. Everything under src/adsb/ and src/contributions/ is the opposite — python -m, package-relative.

Output paths are CWD-relative.

Verification

There is no test framework, linter, or packaging config. Do not add one unprompted, and do not treat "nothing broke" as verification.

The ADS-B path has no cheap end-to-end check — one day of input is tens of GB. Exercise compress_multi_icao_df / compress_df_polars directly against a small hand-built Polars frame.

Never gh workflow run to test a change. Every dispatch pulls tens of GB and fans out over date matrices. Reason about the YAML statically.

Never commit generated data. The product is a GitHub Release; jobs pass state as artifacts.

ADS-B invariants

• FINAL_COLUMN_ORDER (compress_adsb_to_aircraft_data.py) is the only definition of the released column contract. pl.concat matches by position after .select(), and get_latest_release.get_latest_aircraft_adsb_csv_df parses released CSVs against the same order — so a forked copy corrupts the release with no error anywhere.
• load_parquet_part() deleting its source parquet is deliberate: the raw part is many GB and the runner would otherwise exhaust disk. Do not defer the delete to make reruns easier; that raises peak disk by the size of the part.
• A released row means "most informative observation for this ICAO on this UTC day" — non-empty fields not a subset of another row's, tie-broken by signature frequency. It is not a registry record.
• HTTP 404 is terminal in the release fetch. Restoring the retry makes the Dec-31 next-year-repo probe stall ~45 minutes on a repo that does not exist yet.

Never edit or drop a NOTICE entry

Each entry is the permission that makes its asset redistributable; removing one removes the permission. NOTICE is validated as a required release file and is listed in the create-release sparse checkout — keep both. Transport Canada requires its two notices, reproduction and value-added, to reach the consumer together.

LICENSE is MIT and covers code only. It makes no claim over released data, and neither may you — an asset derived from a public-domain source is not itself public domain.

Before adding any registry, judge redistribution, not access, in this order:

1. A public licence travels; a bilateral permission does not. Written permission granted to another project or person is not a licence to this one. That alone disqualifies Taiwan, Estonia and Chile, whatever their commercial terms say.
2. Non-commercial-only conditions are a second, independent bar — they conflict with how these releases are consumed. Do not treat a source clearing this bar as cleared overall; rule 1 still applies. Taiwan is licensed OGDL v1.0, an open licence: its restriction is bilateral, not licence-borne.

CCARCS ACTIVE_FLAG does not mean "current owner": 1,932 currently-Registered marks carry only I parties, and those rows are the MAIL_RECIPIENT. Prefer A parties where a mark has any, fall back to all of them otherwise. Filtering on A alone publishes registered aircraft with no owner.

Owner mailing addresses (street, city, postal code, care-of) are dropped; name, type, province and country are published.

Fork and upstream

src/get_latest_release.py pins REPO = "PlaneQuery/openairframes" on purpose: this fork reads upstream's releases wherever it runs. Do not repoint it at github.repository without being asked.

Upstream develops on develop and PRs into main. The daily release deletes the existing release and tag before recreating them.

Community submissions are automation-owned

Merging to community/** or schemas/** force-pushes every open community-labeled PR branch back onto main. Anything you hand-edit on such a branch is destroyed on the next merge.

• Never hand-author files in community/ — the filename encodes sha256(content)[:8], so an edit orphans the hash and duplicates on re-approval.
• Never invent or copy a contributor_uuid; it is derived from the GitHub user id.
• Do not reintroduce a hardcoded "main" or v1 filename. Both are resolved at runtime now.

A tag's JSON type is fixed by its first-ever submission and enforced forever — emergent from build_tag_type_registry + validate_submission, and written nowhere in the schema. Retyping or renaming an existing tag breaks every future contributor, not just the current one.

Dropping a community_submission.v2.schema.json into schemas/ promotes it atomically across every reader and writer. That is a one-way door for contributors — only on explicit request.

Conventions

• Empty string, not null, everywhere in released frames.
• Reuse derive_from_faa_master_txt.normalize() for openairframes_id; never re-derive the format.
• Python 3.14 for FAA/community/vendor jobs, 3.12 for ADS-B jobs (pyarrow pin + multiprocessing). Deliberate. Match the surrounding job; do not unify.

References with no target — do not chase as regressions

Reference	Missing
process-historical-faa.yaml	src/get_historical_faa.py, scripts/concat_csvs.py
af-klm-fleet/package.json → npm run validate	af-klm-fleet/scripts/validate.js

process-historical-faa.yaml is dead, not stale — it also uses the disabled ::set-output. Repair-vs-delete is the owner's call; leave it alone unprompted.

af-klm-fleet/ and community-routes/ are unwired

Nothing in CI touches either, and nothing consumes community-routes/. af-klm-fleet/ is a vendored project by a different author with its own license — its aircraft model is unrelated to schemas/community_submission.*, so do not merge the two. Its README.md is generated by generate-readme.js; hand edits are overwritten.

Warts left standing — flag, do not silently fix

• NUMBER_PARTS is restated by the matrix and four hand-written upload steps in adsb-to-aircraft-for-day.yaml; changing the constant alone silently drops data. YAML cannot loop upload steps and one merged artifact would force every map job to download all parts, so any real fix is a restructure.
• MAX_WORKERS = OS_CPU_COUNT if OS_CPU_COUNT > 4 else 1 collapses to a single worker on a ≤4-core runner, shrinking files_per_batch with it. Possibly intentional memory control — do not raise it without measuring peak RSS on the target runner.
• update-community-prs.yaml runs regenerate_pr_schema || true then force-pushes, so a regeneration failure ships anyway. Making it fatal leaves PRs un-rebased instead — a judgment call.
• approve_submission.py wraps its schema update in a bare except Exception, so a submission can merge without its new tags reaching the schema.

Workflow authoring

The user's global GitHub Actions rules apply. Existing workflows violate most of them. Do not bulk-remediate — bring only the file you were asked to touch up to standard, and surface the rest in chat.

External sources

registry.faa.gov and ADS-B Exchange are required — the release fails without them. Mictronics is tolerated: it retries, then the job continues without it. adsb.lol may simply not have published a given day, in which case the previous CSV is re-released rather than failing.

FAA refreshes at 05:30 UTC; the release cron fires at 06:00 UTC. That 30-minute margin is the reason for the schedule.