The Substrate
project is an OPENISH Open Source Project
Individuals making significant and valuable contributions are given commit-access to a project to contribute as they see fit. A project is more like an open wiki than a standard guarded open source project.
There are a few basic ground-rules for contributors (including the maintainer(s) of the project):
-
No
--force
pushes or modifying the master branch history in any way. If you need to rebase, ensure you do it in your own repo. -
Non-master branches, prefixed with a short name moniker (e.g.
gav-my-feature
) must be used for ongoing work. -
All modifications must be made in a pull-request to solicit feedback from other contributors.
-
A pull-request must not be merged until CI has finished successfully.
-
Contributors should adhere to the house coding style.
Merging pull requests once CI is successful:
-
A PR needs to be reviewed and approved by project maintainers unless:
-
it does not alter any logic (e.g. comments, dependencies, docs), then it may be tagged
insubstantial
and merged by its author once CI is complete. -
it is an urgent fix with no large change to logic, then it may be merged after a non-author contributor has approved the review once CI is complete.
-
-
Once a PR is ready for review please add the
pleasereview
label. Generally PRs should sit with this label for 48 hours in order to garner feedback. It may be merged before if all relevant parties had a look at it. -
If the first review is not an approval, swap
A0-pleasereview
to any label[A3, A7]
to indicate that the PR has received some feedback, but needs further work. For example.A3-inprogress
is a general indicator that the PR is work in progress andA4-gotissues
means that it has significant problems that need fixing. Once the work is done, change the label back toA0-pleasereview
. You might end up swapping a few times back and forth to climb up the A label group. Once a PR isA8-looksgood
, it is ready to merge. -
PRs that break the external API must be tagged with
breaksapi
, when it changes the SRML or consensus of running system withbreaksconsensus
-
No PR should be merged until all reviews' comments are addressed.
Reviewing pull requests:
When reviewing a pull request, the end-goal is to suggest useful changes to the author. Reviews should finish with approval unless there are issues that would result in:
-
Buggy behavior.
-
Undue maintenance burden.
-
Breaking with house coding style.
-
Pessimization (i.e. reduction of speed as measured in the projects benchmarks).
-
Feature reduction (i.e. it removes some aspect of functionality that a significant minority of users rely on).
-
Uselessness (i.e. it does not strictly add a feature or fix a known issue).
Reviews may not be used as an effective veto for a PR because:
-
There exists a somewhat cleaner/better/faster way of accomplishing the same feature/fix.
-
It does not fit well with some other contributors' longer-term vision for the project.
If your PR changes the external APIs or interfaces used by Polkadot, a corresponding PR on Polkadot must be submitted as well. If you tagged the PR with breaksapi
or breaksconsensus
this is most certainly the case, in all other cases check for it by running step 1.
To update a corresponding Polkadot PR:
-
Pull latest Polkadot master (or clone it, if you haven’t yet).
-
Replace
polkadot-master
in allCargo.toml
with the name of the PR-branch - e.g. by runningfind . -name "Cargo.toml" -exec sed -i "s/polkadot-master/PR_BRANCH/g" {}
(and to your repo, if the branch is not on mainline); Commit this change. -
Make the changes required to pass the build again.
-
Submit all this as a PR against the Polkadot Repo, link that new PR in the existing substrate PR for reference
-
Wait for reviews on both
-
Once both PRs have been green lit, merge the Substrate PR into master and sync the changes onto the
polkadot-master
on mainline (push it). Now revert that first commit in your Polkadot PR, reverting the name back topolkadot-master
, push and wait for the CI to confirm all is fine. Then merge the Polkadot PR.
As there might be multiple pending PRs that might conflict with one another, a) you should not merge the substrate PR until the Polkadot PR has also been reviewed and b) both should be merged pretty quickly after another to not block others.
We use labels to manage PRs and issues and communicate state of a PR. Please familiarize yourself with them. Furthermore we are organizing issues in milestones. Best way to get started is to a pick a ticket from the current milestone tagged easy
or medium
and get going or mentor
and get in contact with the mentor offering their support on that larger task.
This is an experiment and feedback is welcome! This document may also be subject to pull-requests or changes by contributors where you believe you have something valuable to add or change.
These contributing guidelines are modified from the "OPEN Open Source Project" guidelines for the Level project: https://github.com/Level/community/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md