CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing

• Contributing
  • Pull Requests
    • Process for reviewing PRs
    • Updating Documentation
  • Forking
  • Dependencies
  • Protobuf
  • Testing
  • Branching Model and Release
    • PR Targeting
    • Development Procedure
    • Pull Merge Procedure
    • Release Procedure
    • Point Release Procedure
  • Code Owner Membership

Thank you for considering making contributions to finschia-sdk and related repositories!

Contributing to this repo can mean many things such as participating in discussion or proposing code changes. To ensure a smooth workflow for all contributors, the general procedure for contributing has been established:

1. Either open or find an issue you'd like to help with
2. Participate in thoughtful discussion on that issue
3. If you would like to contribute:
   1. If the issue is a proposal, ensure that the proposal has been accepted
   2. Ensure that nobody else has already begun working on this issue. If they have, make sure to contact them to collaborate
   3. If nobody has been assigned for the issue and you would like to work on it, make a comment on the issue to inform the community of your intentions to begin work
   4. Follow standard Github best practices: fork the repo, branch from the HEAD of main, make some commits, and submit a PR to main
      • For core developers working within the finschia-sdk repo, to ensure a clear ownership of branches, branches must be named with the convention {moniker}/{issue#}-branch-name
   5. Be sure to submit the PR in Draft mode submit your PR early, even if it's incomplete as this indicates to the community you're working on something and allows them to provide comments early in the development process
   6. When the code is complete it can be marked Ready for Review
   7. Be sure to include a relevant change log entry in the Unreleased section of CHANGELOG.md (see file for log format)

Note that for very small or blatantly obvious problems (such as typos) it is not required to an open issue to submit a PR, but be aware that for more complex problems/features, if a PR is opened before an adequate design discussion has taken place in a github issue, that PR runs a high likelihood of being rejected.

Other notes:

• Please make sure to run make format before every commit - the easiest way to do this is have your editor run it for you upon saving a file. Additionally please ensure that your code is lint compliant by running golangci-lint run. A convenience git pre-commit hook that runs the formatters automatically before each commit is available in the contrib/githooks/ directory.

Commit Convention

All commits pushed to finschia-sdk are classified according to the rules below. Therefore, it cannot be included in the release notes unless you properly assign the prefix to the commit. For example, you can write commit message like feat: this is new feature. However, if you want to clarify the scope of the commit, you can write it as follows feat(x/token): this is new feature.

• chore : a commit of the type chore makes trivial changes. If you don't want to include specific commit in the release note, add this prefix.
• feat : a commit of the type feat introduces a new feature to the codebase
• fix : a commit of the type fix patches a bug in your codebase
• refactor : A code change that neither fixes a bug nor adds a feature
• BREAKING CHANGE : a commit of the type breaking changes to the codebase. This changes breaks down the backward compatibility
• perf : A code change that improves performance
• test: Adding missing tests or correcting existing tests
• docs: Documentation only changes
• build: Changes that affect the build system or external dependencies
• ci: Changes to our CI configuration files and scripts

Pull Requests

To accommodate review process we suggest that PRs are categorically broken up. Ideally each PR addresses only a single issue. Additionally, as much as possible code refactoring and cleanup should be submitted as a separate PRs from bugfixes/feature-additions.

Process for reviewing PRs

All PRs require two Reviews before merge (except docs changes, or variable name-changes which only require one). When reviewing PRs please use the following review explanations:

• LGTM without an explicit approval means that the changes look good, but you haven't pulled down the code, run tests locally and thoroughly reviewed it.
• Approval through the GH UI means that you understand the code, documentation/spec is updated in the right places, you have pulled down and tested the code locally. In addition:
  • You must also think through anything which ought to be included but is not
  • You must think through whether any added code could be partially combined (DRYed) with existing code
  • You must think through any potential security issues or incentive-compatibility flaws introduced by the changes
  • Naming must be consistent with conventions and the rest of the codebase
  • Code must live in a reasonable location, considering dependency structures (e.g. not importing testing modules in production code, or including example code modules in production code).
  • if you approve of the PR, you are responsible for fixing any of the issues mentioned here and more
• If you sat down with the PR submitter and did a pairing review please note that in the Approval, or your PR comments.
• If you are only making "surface level" reviews, submit any notes as Comments without adding a review.

Updating Documentation

If you open a PR on the LBM SDK, it is mandatory to update the relevant documentation in /docs.

• If your change relates to the core SDK (baseapp, store, ...), please update the docs/basics/, docs/core/ and/or docs/building-modules/ folders.
• If your changes relate to the core of the CLI (not specifically to module's CLI/Rest), please modify the docs/run-node/ folder.
• If your changes relate to a module, please update the module's spec in x/moduleName/docs/spec/.

Forking

Please note that Go requires code to live under absolute paths, which complicates forking. While my fork lives at https://github.com/someone/finschia-sdk, the code should never exist at $GOPATH/src/github.com/someone/finschia-sdk. Instead, we use git remote to add the fork as a new remote for the original repo, $GOPATH/src/github.com/Finschia/finschia-sdk, and do all the work there.

For instance, to create a fork and work on a branch of it, I would:

• Create the fork on github, using the fork button.
• Go to the original repo checked out locally (i.e. $GOPATH/src/github.com/Finschia/finschia-sdk)
• git remote rename origin upstream
• git remote add origin git@github.com:someone/finschia-sdk.git

Now origin refers to my fork and upstream refers to the finschia-sdk version. So I can git push -u origin main to update my fork, and make pull requests to finschia-sdk from there. Of course, replace someone with your git handle.

To pull in updates from the origin repo, run

• git fetch upstream
• git rebase upstream/main (or whatever branch you want)

Please don't make Pull Requests from main.

Dependencies

We use Go 1.20 Modules to manage dependency versions.

The main branch of every LBM repository should just build with go get, which means they should be kept up-to-date with their dependencies, so we can get away with telling people they can just go get our software.

Since some dependencies are not under our control, a third party may break our build, in which case we can fall back on go mod tidy -v.

Protobuf

We use Protocol Buffers along with gogoproto to generate code for use in finschia-sdk.

For determinstic behavior around Protobuf tooling, everything is containerized using Docker. Make sure to have Docker installed on your machine, or head to Docker's website to install it.

For formatting code in .proto files, you can run make proto-format command.

For linting and checking breaking changes, we use buf. You can use the commands make proto-lint and make proto-check-breaking to respectively lint your proto files and check for breaking changes.

To generate the protobuf stubs, you can run make proto-gen.

We also added the make proto-all command to run all the above commands sequentially.

In order for imports to properly compile in your IDE, you may need to manually set your protobuf path in your IDE's workspace settings/config.

For example, in vscode your .vscode/settings.json should look like:

{
    "protoc": {
        "options": [
        "--proto_path=${workspaceRoot}/proto",
        "--proto_path=${workspaceRoot}/third_party/proto"
        ]
    }
}

Testing

Tests can be ran by running make test at the top level of the SDK repository.

We expect tests to use require or assert rather than t.Skip or t.Fail, unless there is a reason to do otherwise. When testing a function under a variety of different inputs, we prefer to use table driven tests. Table driven test error messages should follow the following format <desc>, tc #<index>, i #<index>. <desc> is an optional short description of whats failing, tc is the index within the table of the testcase that is failing, and i is when there is a loop, exactly which iteration of the loop failed. The idea is you should be able to see the error message and figure out exactly what failed. Here is an example check:

<some table>
for tcIndex, tc := range cases {
  <some code>
  for i := 0; i < tc.numTxsToTest; i++ {
      <some code>
			require.Equal(t, expectedTx[:32], calculatedTx[:32],
				"First 32 bytes of the txs differed. tc #%d, i #%d", tcIndex, i)

Branching Model and Release

User-facing repos should adhere to the trunk based development branching model: https://trunkbaseddevelopment.com/.

Libraries need not follow the model strictly, but would be wise to.

The SDK utilizes semantic versioning.

PR Targeting

Ensure that you base and target your PR on the main branch.

All feature additions should be targeted against main. Bug fixes for an outstanding release candidate should be targeted against the release candidate branch.

Development Procedure

• the latest state of development is on main
• main must never fail make lint test test-race
• main should not fail make lint
• no --force onto main (except when reverting a broken commit, which should seldom happen)
• create a development branch either on github.com/Finschia/finschia-sdk, or your fork (using git remote add origin)
• before submitting a pull request, begin git rebase on top of main

Pull Merge Procedure

• ensure pull branch is rebased on main
• run make test to ensure that all tests pass
• merge pull request (We are using squash and merge for small features)

Release Procedure

• Start on main
• Create the release candidate branch rc/v* (going forward known as RC) and ensure it's protected against pushing from anyone except the release manager/coordinator
  • no PRs targeting this branch should be merged unless exceptional circumstances arise
• On the RC branch, prepare a new version section in the CHANGELOG.md
  • All links must be link-ified: $ python ./scripts/linkify_changelog.py CHANGELOG.md
  • Copy the entries into a RELEASE_CHANGELOG.md, this is needed so the bot knows which entries to add to the release page on github.
• Kick off a large round of simulation testing (e.g. 400 seeds for 2k blocks)
• If errors are found during the simulation testing, commit the fixes to main and create a new RC branch (making sure to increment the rcN)
• After simulation has successfully completed, create the release branch (release/vX.XX.X) from the RC branch
• Create a PR to main to incorporate the CHANGELOG.md updates
• Tag the release (use git tag -a) and create a release in Github
• Delete the RC branches