Standard: Maintenance Sweep

A documented, repeatable whole-repo tidy that returns a project to a clean shipped baseline — no stray branches, no PR limbo, current-state docs matching the code, dev and main in sync and green. Every project runs the same sweep instead of improvising one, so drift is caught on a cadence rather than whenever someone notices. Proposed by Random AI Prompt after a sweep found status.md five versions stale, eight merged branches lingering, and an open Dependabot PR.

Canonical, project-agnostic standard. It composes existing standards rather than restating them — git-workflow.md, repo-hygiene.md, versioning.md, docs-lifecycle.md, legal-docs.md, testing.md. Run it periodically, and after a big push. Like every cross-cutting procedure it is audit-first, act only on go-ahead.

The sweep

1. Audit read-only first. fetch --prune, then enumerate local + remote branches (--merged and --no-merged on both), open PRs/issues, and CI health — a complete picture before touching anything.
2. Triage PRs/issues — surface, don't auto-act. Every open item (Dependabot PRs included) is a decision for the owner: merge / close / leave. An unattended run reports and waits; it never merges, closes, or pushes a PR on its own.
3. Close merged branches only. git branch -d (never -D) as the guard; confirm merged via --no-merged first (by full ref name, per repo-hygiene). Target end state: only main + dev (plus any deliberately-kept / in-flight release branch).
4. Ship dev → main per git-workflow — including the SemVer gate (docs/ notes/test/dev-dependency-only changes don't move the version) and the mandatory back-merge so dev contains main afterward.
5. Reconcile current-state docs with the code (docs-lifecycle): status.md (version line, any "pending review" phrasing for shipped work, health/issue tables with freshly-run numbers), README, changelog/sessions, credits, and legal pages (legal-docs) — plus a stale-reference git grep and the broken-link gate. Fix current-state; leave dated history intact.
6. Verify before and after (testing): the project's headless gate + the tidy/link checks; record the real pass numbers, and only claim what was actually run this sweep.
7. Record. Focused commits with in-commit changelog entries, a session-log entry, and — when run as a fairyfox procedure — a process report.

Safety rules (all standing, restated because the sweep touches destructive-adjacent steps): never delete a branch with unmerged commits; never merge/close/push a PR without go-ahead; never force-push, rewrite pushed history, reset --hard, or delete main/dev; inspect git status before and after.

Verify (is it being followed?)

The per-standard slice the compliance audit aggregates — done/partial/missing: