Thank you for your interest in contributing. The goal of ibc-rs is to provide a high quality, formally verified implementation of the IBC protocol.
All work on the code base should be motivated by a Github Issue. Search is a good place start when looking for places to contribute. If you would like to work on an issue which already exists, please indicate so by leaving a comment. If you'd like to work on something else, open an Issue to start the discussion.
The rest of this document outlines the best practices for contributing to this repository:
- Decision Making - process for agreeing to changes
- Forking - fork the repo to make pull requests
- Changelog - changes must be recorded in the changelog
- Pull Requests - what makes a good pull request
When contributing to the project, the following process leads to the best chance of landing the changes in master.
All new contributions should start with a Github Issue. The issue helps capture the problem you're trying to solve and allows for early feedback. Once the issue is created, maintainers may request more detailed documentation be written in the form of a Request for Comment (RFC) or Architectural Decision Record (ADR).
Discussion at the RFC stage will build collective understanding of the dimensions of the problems and help structure conversations around trade-offs.
When the problem is well understood but the solution leads to large structural changes to the code base, these changes should be proposed in the form of an Architectural Decision Record (ADR). The ADR will help build consensus on an overall strategy to ensure the code base maintains coherence in the larger context. If you are not comfortable with writing an ADR, you can open a less-formal issue and the maintainers will help you turn it into an ADR.
TODO: ADR registration (eg. in an ADR registration issue)
When the problem as well as proposed solution are well understood, changes should start with a draft pull request against master. The draft signals that work is underway. When the work is ready for feedback, hitting "Ready for Review" will signal to the maintainers to take a look.
Implementation trajectories should aim to proceed where possible as a series of smaller incremental changes, in the form of small PRs that can be merged quickly. This helps manage the load for reviewers and reduces the likelihood that PRs will sit open for longer.
Each stage of the process is aimed at creating feedback cycles which align contributors and maintainers to make sure:
- Contributors don’t waste their time implementing/proposing features which won’t land in
master. - Maintainers have the necessary context in order to support and review contributions.
If you do not have write access to the repository, your contribution should be made through a fork on Github. Fork the repository, contribute to your fork, and make a pull request back upstream.
When forking, add your fork's URL as a new git remote in your local copy of the repo. For instance, to create a fork and work on a branch of it:
- Create the fork on GitHub, using the fork button.
cdto the original clone of the repo on your machinegit remote rename origin upstream- `git remote add origin git@github.com:
Now origin refers to your fork and upstream refers to this version.
Now git push -u origin master to update the fork, and make pull requests against this repo.
To pull in updates from the origin repo, run
git fetch upstreamgit rebase upstream/master(or whatever branch you want)
Every non-trivial PR must update the CHANGELOG.md.
The Changelog is not a record of what Pull Requests were merged; the commit history already shows that. The Changelog is a notice to users about how their expectations of the software should be modified. It is part of the UX of a release and is a critical user facing integration point. The Changelog must be clean, inviting, and readable, with concise, meaningful entries. Entries must be semantically meaningful to users. If a change takes multiple Pull Requests to complete, it should likely have only a single entry in the Changelog describing the net effect to the user. Instead of linking PRs directly, we instead prefer to log issues, which tend to be higher-level, hence more relevant for users.
When writing Changelog entries, ensure they are targeting users of the software, not fellow developers. Developers have much more context and care about more things than users do. Changelogs are for users.
Changelog structure is modeled after Tendermint Core and Hashicorp Consul. See those changelogs for examples.
We currently split changes for a given release between these four sections: Breaking Changes, Features, Improvements, Bug Fixes.
Entries in the changelog should initially be logged in the Unreleased section, which represents a "staging area" for accumulating all the changes throughout a release (see Pull Requests below). With each release, the entries then move from this section into their permanent place under a specific release number in Changelog.
Changelog entries should be formatted as follows:
- [pkg] Some description about the change ([#xxx]) (optional @contributor)
Here, pkg is the part of the code that changed (typically a
top-level crate, but could be /), xxx is the issue number, and contributor
is the author/s of the change.
It's also acceptable for xxx to refer to the relevant pull request, but issue
numbers are preferred.
Note this means issues (or pull-requests) should be opened first so the changelog can then
be updated with the corresponding number.
Changelog entries should be ordered alphabetically according to the
pkg, and numerically according to their issue/PR number.
Changes with multiple classifications should be doubly included (eg. a bug fix that is also a breaking change should be recorded under both).
Breaking changes are further subdivided according to the APIs/users they impact. Any change that effects multiple APIs/users should be recorded multiply - for instance, a change to some core protocol data structure might need to be reflected both as breaking the core protocol but also breaking any APIs where core data structures are exposed.
The master development branch is master.
Branch names should be prefixed with the author, eg. name/feature-x.
Pull requests are made against master
and are squash merged into master.
PRs must:
- make reference to an issue outlining the context.
- update any relevant documentation and include tests.
- update CHANGELOG.md with a description of the change in the Unreleased section.
Pull requests should aim to be small and self contained to facilitate quick review and merging. Larger change sets should be broken up across multiple PRs. Commits should be concise but informative, and moderately clean. Commits will be squashed into a single commit for the PR with all the commit messages.