CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing

Guidelines

Guidelines for contributing.

How can I get involved?

The Discourse forum is the best place to keep up to date with the project and to get help contributing. Here we exchange ideas, ask questions and chat about Akash.

There are a number of areas where contributions can be accepted:

• Write Golang code for the CLI, Akash Node (tendermint) and Akash Provider Manager (Kubernetes)
• Write features for the front-end UI (JS, HTML, CSS)
• Write sample functions in any language
• Review pull requests
• Test out new features or work-in-progress
• Get involved in design reviews, request-for-comments (RFCs) and technical proof-of-concepts (PoCs)
• Help release and package Akash including the helm chart, compose files, kubectl YAML, marketplaces and stores
• Manage, triage and research Issues and Pull Requests
• Engage with the growing community by providing technical support on Slack/GitHub
• Create docs, guides and write blogs
• Speak at meet-ups, conferences or by helping folks with Akash on the Discourse forum

This is just a short list of ideas, if you have other ideas for contributing please make a suggestion.

I want to contribute on GitHub

I've found a typo

• A Pull Request is not necessary. Raise an Issue and we'll fix it as soon as we can.

I have a (great) idea

The Akash maintainers would like to make Akash the best it can be and welcome new contributions that align with the project's goals. Our time is limited so we'd like to make sure we agree on the proposed work before you spend time doing it. Saying "no" is hard which is why we'd rather say "yes" ahead of time. You need to raise a proposal.

Every feature carries a cost - a cost if developed wrong, a cost to carry and maintain it and if it wasn't needed in the first place then this is an unnecessary burden. See Yagni from Martin Fowler. The best proposals are defensible with real data and are more than a hypothesis.

Please do not raise a proposal after doing the work - this is counter to the spirit of the project. It is hard to be objective about something which has already been done

What makes a good proposal?

• Brief summary including motivation/context
• Any design changes
• Pros + Cons
• Effort required up front
• Effort required for CI/CD, release, ongoing maintenance
• Migration strategy / backwards-compatibility
• Mock-up screenshots or examples of how the CLI would work
• Clear examples of how to reproduce any issue the proposal is addressing

Once your proposal receives a design/approved label you may go ahead and start work on your Pull Request.

If you are proposing a new tool or service please do due diligence. Does this tool already exist in a 3rd party project or library? Can we reuse it? For example: a timer / CRON-type scheduler for invoking functions is a well-solved problem, do we need to reinvent the wheel?

Every effort will be made to work with contributors who do not follow the process. Your PR may be closed or marked as invalid if it is left inactive, or the proposal cannot move into a design/approved status.

Paperwork for Pull Requests

Ensure that you base and target your PR on the main branch. All feature additions and all bug fixes must be targeted against main. Exception is for bug fixes which are only related to a released version. In that case, the related bug fix PRs must target against the release branch. If needed, we backport a commit from main to a release branch (excluding consensus breaking feature, API breaking and similar).

Testing

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

Please follow style guide on this blog post from The Go Programming Language

If you are making changes to code that use goroutines, consider adding goleak to your test to help ensure that we are not leaking any goroutines. Simply add

defer goleak.VerifyNoLeaks(t)

at the very beginning of the test, and it will fail the test if it detects goroutines that were opened but never cleaned up at the end of the test.

I have a question, a suggestion or need help

If you have a simple question you can join the Akash community and ask there, but please bear in mind that contributors may live in a different timezone or be working to a different timeline to you. If you have an urgent request then let them know about this.

If you have a deeply technical request or need help debugging your application then you should prepare a simple, public GitHub repository with the minimum amount of code required to reproduce the issue.

If you feel there is an issue with Akash or were unable to get the help you needed from the Slack channels then raise an issue on one of the GitHub repositories.

Setting expectations, support and SLAs

• What kind of support can I expect for free?

  If you are using one of the Open Source projects within the akash repository, then help is offered on a good-will basis by volunteers. You can also request help from employees of Overclock Labs, Inc who host the Akash testnet.

  Please be respectful of volunteer time, it is often limited to evenings and weekends. The person you are requesting help from may not reside in your timezone.

  The Akash chat is the best place to ask questions, suggest features, and to get help. The GitHub issue tracker can be used for suspected issues with the codebase or deployment artifacts.

• What is the SLA for my Issue?

  Issues are examined, triaged and answered on a best effort basis by volunteers and community contributors. This means that you may receive an initial response within any time period such as: 1 minute, 1 hour, 1 day, or 1 week. There is no implicit meaning to the time between you raising an issue and it being answered or resolved.

  If you see an issue which does not have a response or does not have a resolution, it does not mean that it is not important, or that it is being ignored. It simply means it has not been worked on by a volunteer yet.

  Please take responsibility for following up on your Issues if you feel further action is required.

• What is the SLA for my Pull Request?

  In a similar way to Issues, Pull Requests are triaged, reviewed, and considered by a team of volunteers - the Core Team, Members Team and the Project Lead. There are dozens of components that make up the Akash project and a limited amount of people. Sometimes PRs may become blocked or require further action.

  Please take responsibility for following up on your Pull Requests if you feel further action is required.

• Why may your PR be delayed?

  • The contributing guide was not followed in some way

  • The commits are not signed-off

  • The commits need to be rebased

  • Changes have been requested

  More information, a use-case, or context may be required for the change to be accepted.

• What if I need more than that?

  If you're a company using any of these projects, you can get the following through a support agreement with Overclock Labs, Inc so that the time can be paid for to help your business.

  A support agreement can be tailored to your needs, you may benefit from support, if you need any of the following:

  • responses within N hours/days on issues/PRs
  • feature prioritization
  • urgent help
  • 1:1 consultations
  • or any other level of professional services

I need to add a dependency

The concept of vendoring is used in projects written in Go. This means that a copy of the source-code of dependencies is stored within each repository in the vendor folder. It allows for a repeatable build and isolates change.

The chosen tool for vendoring code in the project is dep.

Note: despite the availability of Go modules in Go 1.11, they are not being used in the project at this time. If and when the decision is made to move, a complete overhaul of all repositories will need to be made in a coordinated fashion, including regression and integration testing. This is not a trivial task.

How are releases made?

Releases are made by the Project Lead on a regular basis and when deemed necessary. If you want to request a new release then mention this on your PR or Issue.

Releases are cut with git tags and a successful Travis build results in new binary artifacts and Docker images being published to the Docker Hub and Quay.io. See the "Build" badge on each GitHub README file for more.

How are credentials managed for quay.io and the Docker Hub? These credentials are maintained by the Project Lead.

Governance

Akash Network is an independent open-source project which was created by the Overclock Labs, Inc in 2017. The project is maintained and developed by a number of regular volunteers and a wider community of open-source developers.

Overclock Labs hosts and sponsors the development and maintenance of Akash Network. Overclock Labs provides professional services, consultation and support. Contact us at akash.network/contact to find out more.

Akash Network ™ is a registered trademark of Overclock Labs.

Project Lead

Responsibility for the project starts with the Project Lead, who delegates specific responsibilities and the corresponding authority to the Core and Members team.

Some duties include:

• Setting overall technical & community leadership
• Engaging end-user community to advocate needs of end-users and to capture case-studies
• Defining and curating roadmap for Akash Network
• Building a community and team of contributors
• Community & media briefings, out-bound communications, partnerships, relationship management and events

How do I become a maintainer?

In the Akash community there are three levels of structure or maintainership:

• Core Team (GitHub org)
• Members Team (GitHub org)
• The rest of the community.

Core Team

The Core Team includes:

• Greg Osuri (@gosuri)
• Adam Bozanich (@abozanich)
• Daniel Ceballos (@dceballos)
• Boz Menzalji (@bmenzalji)

The Core Team have the ear of the Project Lead. They help with strategy, project maintenance, community management, and make a regular commitment of time to the project on a weekly basis. The Core Team will usually be responsible for, or be a subject-matter-expert (SME) for a sub-system of Akash Network. Core Team may be granted write (push) access to one or more sub-systems.

The Core Team gain access to a private core channel and are required to participate on a regular basis.

The Core Team have the same expectations and perks of the Membership Team, in addition will need to keep in close contact with the rest of the Core Team and the Project Lead.

• Core Team are expected to attend 1:1 video conferencing calls with the Project Lead up to once per week
• Core Team members will notify the Project Lead and Core Team of any leave of a week or more and set a status in Slack of "away".

Core Team attend all project meetings and calls. Allowances will be made for timezones and other commitments.

Members Team

The Members Team are contributors who are well-known to the community with a track record of:

• fixing, testing and triaging issues and PRs
• offering support to the project
• providing feedback and being available to help where needed
• testing and reviewing pull requests
• joining contributor meetings and supporting new contributors

Note: An essential skill for being in a team is communication. If you cannot communicate with your team on a regular basis, then membership may not be for you and you are welcome to contribute as community.

Members Team Perks:

• access to a private Slack channel
• profile posted on the Team page of the Akash website
• membership of the GitHub organizations Akash-Network

Upon request and subject to availability:

• 1:1 coaching & mentorship
• help with speaking opportunities and CfP submissions
• help with CV, resume and LinkedIn profile
• review, and promotion of blogs and tutorials on social media

The Members Team are expected to:

• participate in the members channel and engage with the topics
• participate in community Zoom calls (when possible within your timezone)
• make regular contributions to the project codebase
• comment on and engage with project proposals
• attend occasional 1:1 meetings with members of the Core Team or the Project Lead

This group is intended to be an active team that shares the load and collaborates together. This means engaging in topics on Chat, encouraging other teammates, sharing ideas, helping the users and raising issues with the Core Team.

Community/project meetings and calls

The community calls are held on Zoom on a regular basis with invitations sent out via email ahead of time.

General format:

• Project updates/briefing
• Round-table intros/updates
• Demos of features/new work from community
• Q&A

If you would like invites, sign-up to Slack and pick "Yes" to Community Events and Updates.

Branding guidelines

For press, branding, logos and marks see the Akash Network website.

Community

This project is written in Golang but many of the community contributions so far have been through blogging, speaking engagements, helping to test and drive the backlog of Akash. If you'd like to help in any way then that would be more than welcome whatever your level of experience.

Chat

There is a forum which you are welcome to join to discuss Akash Network, Kubernetes, Serverless, FaaS, Blockchain.

Join discourse here

Join Discord here

Roadmap

• Browse open issues in overclock/akash

License

This project is licensed under the Apache 2.0 License.

Copyright notice

It is important to state that you retain copyright for your contributions, but agree to license them for usage by the project and author(s) under the Apache 2.0 license. Git retains history of authorship, but we use a catch-all statement rather than individual names.

Please add a Copyright notice to new files you add where this is not already present.

// Copyright (c) Akash Network Author(s) 2019. All rights reserved.
// Licensed under the Apache 2.0 license. See LICENSE file in the project root for full license information.

Sign your work

Note: every commit in your PR or Patch must be signed-off.

The sign-off is a simple line at the end of the explanation for a patch. Your signature certifies that you wrote the patch or otherwise have the right to pass it on as an open-source patch. The rules are pretty simple: if you can certify the below (from developercertificate.org):

Developer Certificate of Origin
Version 1.1

Copyright (C) 2004, 2006 The Linux Foundation and its contributors.
1 Letterman Drive
Suite D4700
San Francisco, CA, 94129

Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this
license document, but changing it is not allowed.

Developer's Certificate of Origin 1.1

By making a contribution to this project, I certify that:

(a) The contribution was created in whole or in part by me and I
    have the right to submit it under the open source license
    indicated in the file; or

(b) The contribution is based upon previous work that, to the best
    of my knowledge, is covered under an appropriate open source
    license and I have the right under that license to submit that
    work with modifications, whether created in whole or in part
    by me, under the same open source license (unless I am
    permitted to submit under a different license), as indicated
    in the file; or

(c) The contribution was provided directly to me by some other
    person who certified (a), (b) or (c) and I have not modified
    it.

(d) I understand and agree that this project and the contribution
    are public and that a record of the contribution (including all
    personal information I submit with it, including my sign-off) is
    maintained indefinitely and may be redistributed consistent with
    this project or the open source license(s) involved.

Then you just add a line to every git commit message:

Signed-off-by: Joe Smith <joe.smith@email.com>

Use your real name (sorry, no pseudonyms or anonymous contributions.)

If you set your user.name and user.email git configs, you can sign your commit automatically with git commit -s.

Please sign your commits with git commit -s so that commits are traceable.

This is different from digital signing using GPG, GPG is not required for making contributions to the project.

If you forgot to sign your work and want to fix that, see the following guide: Git: Rewriting History