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Contributing

Thank you for your interest in contributing to tendermint-rs! The goal of tendermint-rs is to provide a high quality, formally verified interface to Tendermint.

This document outlines the best practices for contributing to this repository:

Proposing Changes

When contributing to the project, adhering to the following guidelines will dramatically increase the likelihood of changes being accepted quickly.

Create/locate and assign yourself to an issue

  1. A good place to start is to search through the existing issues for the problem you're encountering.
  2. If no relevant issues exist, submit one describing the problem you're facing, as well as a definition of done. A definition of done, which tells us how to know when the issue can be closed, helps us to scope the problem and give it definite boundaries. Without a definition of done, issues can become vague, amorphous changesets that never really come to a satisfactory conclusion.
  3. Once the issue exists, assign yourself to it. If there's already someone assigned to the issue, comment on the issue to ask if you can take it over, or reach out directly to the current assignee.

Small PRs

We consider a PR to be "small" if it's under 100 lines' worth of meaningful code changes, but we will accommodate PRs of up to about 300 lines. Only in exceptional circumstances will we review larger PRs.

Keeping PRs small helps reduce maintainers' workloads, increases speed of getting feedback, and prevents PRs from standing open for long periods of time. If you need to make bigger changes, it's recommended that you plan out your changes in smaller, more manageable chunks (e.g. one issue may take several PRs to address).

ADRs

If your proposed changes are large, complex, or involve substantial changes to the architecture of one or more components, a maintainer may ask that you first submit an ADR (architecture decision record) before you start coding your solution.

ADRs are a way for us to keep track of why we've made specific architectural changes over time. This is intended to help newcomers to the codebase understand our current architecture and how it has evolved, as well as to help us not repeat past mistakes.

If you need help with developing an ADR, feel free to ask us.

Forking

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.
  • cd to the original clone of the repo on your machine
  • git remote rename origin upstream
  • git remote add origin git@github.com:<location of fork>

Now origin refers to your fork and upstream refers to this version.

git push -u origin main to update the fork, and make pull requests against this repo.

To pull in updates from the origin repo, run

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

Changelog

Every non-trivial PR must update the CHANGELOG.md. This is accomplished indirectly by adding entries to the .changelog folder in unclog format. CHANGELOG.md will be built by whomever is responsible for performing a release just prior to release - this is to avoid changelog conflicts prior to releases.

The Changelog is not a record of which pull requests were merged; the commit history already shows that. The Changelog is a notice to the user 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.

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.

Changes for a given release should be split between the five sections: Security, Breaking Changes, Features, Improvements, Bug Fixes.

Changelog entries should be formatted as follows:

- `[pkg]` A description of the change with *users* in mind
  ([#xxx](https://github.com/informalsystems/tendermint-rs/issues/xxx))

Here, pkg is the part of the code that changed, and xxx is the issue or pull request number.

Changelog entries should be ordered alphabetically according to the pkg, and numerically according to the issue/pull-request 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.

Pull Requests

Pull requests are squash-merged into one of the following primary development branches:

  • main - targeting compatibility with the latest official release of Tendermint.
  • tendermint-rs version-specific branches, e.g. v0.23.x - targeting patches to older versions of tendermint-rs.

Indicate in your pull request which version of Tendermint/tendermint-rs you are targeting with your changes. Changes to multiple versions will require separate PRs. See the README for the version support matrix.

Branch names should be prefixed with the author, eg. name/feature-x.

PRs must:

  • make reference to an issue outlining the context.
  • update any relevant documentation and include tests.
  • update the changelog with a description of the change

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.

Draft PRs

When the problem as well as proposed solution are well understood, changes should start with a draft pull request against main. 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. Maintainers will not review draft PRs.

Releases

Our release process is as follows:

  1. Update the changelog to reflect and summarize all changes in the release. This involves:
    1. Running unclog release vX.Y.Z to create a summary of all of the changes in this release.
    2. Running unclog build > CHANGELOG.md to update the changelog.
    3. Committing this updated CHANGELOG.md file, as well as any .changelog files, to the repo.
  2. Push this to a branch release/vX.Y.Z according to the version number of the anticipated release (e.g. release/v0.17.0) and open a draft PR.
  3. Bump all relevant versions in the codebase to the new version and push these changes to the release PR. This includes all Cargo.toml files (making sure dependencies' versions are updated too).
  4. Run cargo doc --all-features --open locally to double-check that all the documentation compiles and seems up-to-date and coherent. Fix any potential issues here and push them to the release PR.
  5. Mark the PR as Ready for Review and incorporate feedback on the release.
  6. Once approved, merge the PR to main, create a signed tag with the new version (e.g. v0.31.0) and push the tag. The release workflow will run the release.sh script in a CI worker.
  7. If some crates have not been released, check the cause of the failure and act accordingly:
    1. In case of intermittent problems with the registry, rerun the script locally to publish any missing crates from this release. This step requires the appropriate privileges to push crates to crates.io.
    2. In case the problems arise from the source files, fix them, bump a new patch version (e.g. v0.31.1) and repeat the process with its corresponding new tag.