On submitting pull requests

Choosing the right base branch

The WRC operates with two branches:

• draft is the current work-in-progress branch, and where any new Regulations change will land
• official is the current official version of the WCA Regulations and Guidelines. When a new release of the Regulations is created, the WRC merges the current draft into official.

By default, please submit it using draft as the base branch.

Textual revisions

Per the WCA Motion for Amendments of Regulations:

Amendments consisting of changes that are urgent and/or corrections of clerical errors may be processed as an update of the Regulations and can be handed over to the WCA Board directly, without the process described in Article 1 of this Motion.

We consider such pull requests textual revisions, and you may submit them using official as the base branch.

We need to make textual revisions against official because once the changes are merged into official, the WRC will merge official into draft to port your changes to the current work-in-progress version. It's necessary, as doing it the other way around (merging first in draft, then backporting to official) would also bring all the current major changes from draft to official, which is definitely not something we want. Other options (such as cherry-picking) are not viable, as we want draft and official to share the same history (and not rewrite it!).

In general, we don't issue textual revisions for minor fixes like typos or other fixes where the meaning was already fairly clear, preferring to merge them into draft and include them in the following official release. This allows us to respect the WCA Board's limited time by avoiding too many individual updates to the official version.