The Ferrite Core project operates an open contributor model where anyone is welcome to contribute towards development in the form of peer review, testing and patches. This document explains the practical process and guidelines for contributing.
Firstly in terms of structure, there is no particular concept of "Core developers" in the sense of privileged people. Open source often naturally revolves around meritocracy where longer term contributors gain more trust from the developer community. However, some hierarchy is necessary for practical purposes. As such there are repository "maintainers" who are responsible for merging pull requests as well as a "lead maintainer" who is responsible for the release cycle, overall merging, moderation and appointment of maintainers.
Most communication about Ferrite Core development happens on the #ferrite-core channel on Telegram. The easiest way to participate on Telegram is with the web client, Telegram.
Discussion about code base improvements happens in GitHub issues and on pull requests.
The codebase is maintained using the "contributor workflow" where everyone without exception contributes patch proposals using "pull requests". This facilitates social contribution, easy testing and peer review.
To contribute a patch, the workflow is as follows:
- Fork repository
- Create topic branch
- Commit patches
The project coding conventions in the developer notes must be adhered to.
In general commits should be atomic and diffs should be easy to read. For this reason do not mix any formatting fixes or code moves with actual code changes.
Commit messages should be verbose by default consisting of a short subject line (50 chars max), a blank line and detailed explanatory text as separate paragraph(s), unless the title alone is self-explanatory (like "Corrected typo in init.cpp") in which case a single title line is sufficient.
The title of the pull request should be prefixed by the component or area that the pull request affects. Valid areas as:
- Consensus for changes to consensus critical code
- Docs for changes to the documentation
- Qt for changes to ferrite-qt
- Mining for changes to the mining code
- Net or P2P for changes to the peer-to-peer network code
- RPC/REST/ZMQ for changes to the RPC, REST or ZMQ APIs
- Scripts and tools for changes to the scripts and tools
- Tests for changes to the ferrite unit tests or QA tests
- Trivial should only be used for PRs that do not change generated
executable code. Notably, refactors (change of function arguments and code
reorganization) and changes in behavior should not be marked as trivial.
Examples of trivial PRs are changes to:
- comments
- whitespace
- variable names
- logging and messages
- Utils and libraries for changes to the utils and libraries
- Wallet for changes to the wallet code
Examples:
Consensus: Add new opcode for BIP-XXXX OP_CHECKAWESOMESIG
Net: Automatically create hidden service, listen on Tor
Qt: Add feed bump button
Trivial: Fix typo in init.cpp
The body of the pull request should contain enough description about what the patch does together with any justification/reasoning. You should include references to any discussions (for example other tickets or mailing list discussions).
At this stage one should expect comments and review from other contributors. You can add more commits to your pull request by committing them locally and pushing to your fork until you have satisfied all feedback.
If your pull request is accepted for merging, you may be asked by a maintainer to squash and or rebase your commits before it will be merged. The basic squashing workflow is shown below.
git checkout your_branch_name
git rebase -i HEAD~n
# n is normally the number of commits in the pull request.
# Set commits (except the one in the first line) from 'pick' to 'squash', save and quit.
# On the next screen, edit/refine commit messages.
# Save and quit.
git push -f # (force push to GitHub)
Please update the resulting commit message if needed, it should read as a coherent message. In most cases this means that you should not just list the interim commits.
If you have problems with squashing (or other workflows with git), you can
alternatively enable "Allow edits from maintainers" in the right GitHub
sidebar and ask for help in the pull request.
Patchsets should always be focused. For example, a pull request could add a feature, fix a bug, or refactor code; but not a mixture. Please also avoid super pull requests which attempt to do too much, are overly large, or overly complex as this makes review difficult.
When adding a new feature, thought must be given to the long term technical debt and maintenance that feature may require after inclusion. Before proposing a new feature that will require maintenance, please consider if you are willing to maintain it (including bug fixing). If features get orphaned with no maintainer in the future, they may be removed by the Repository Maintainer.
Refactoring is a necessary part of any software project's evolution. The following guidelines cover refactoring pull requests for the project.
Project maintainers aim for a quick turnaround on refactoring pull requests, so where possible keep them short, uncomplex and easy to verify.
The following applies to code changes to the Ferrite Core project.
In general, all pull requests must:
- Have a clear use case, fix a demonstrable bug or serve the greater good of the project (for example refactoring for modularisation);
- Be well peer reviewed;
- Where bugs are fixed, where possible, there should be unit tests demonstrating the bug and also proving the fix. This helps prevent regression.
Patches that change Ferrite consensus rules are considerably more involved than normal because they affect the entire ecosystem and so must be preceded by extensive mailing list discussions and have a numbered BIP.
While each case will be different, one should be prepared to expend more time and effort than for other kinds of patches because of increased peer review and consensus building requirements.
Anyone may participate in peer review which is expressed by comments in the pull request. Typically reviewers will review the code for obvious errors, as well as test out the patch set and opine on the technical merits of the patch.
Project maintainers reserve the right to weigh the opinions of peer reviewers using common sense judgement and also may weight based on meritocracy: Those that have demonstrated a deeper commitment and understanding towards the project (over time) or have clear domain expertise may naturally have more weight, as one would expect in all walks of life.
Where a patch set affects consensus critical code, the bar will be set much higher in terms of discussion and peer review requirements, keeping in mind that mistakes could be very costly to the wider community. This includes refactoring of consensus critical code.
Where a patch set proposes to change the Ferrite consensus, it must have been discussed extensively.
The project leader is the release manager for each Ferrite Core release.
By contributing to this repository, you agree to license your work under the
MIT license unless specified otherwise in contrib/debian/copyright or at
the top of the file itself. Any work contributed where you are not the original
author must contain its license header with the original author(s) and source.