Firstly in terms of structure, there is no particular concept of "bitcoinjs developers" in a sense of privileged people. Open source revolves around a meritocracy where contributors who help gain trust from the community.
For practical purpose, there are repository "maintainers" who are responsible for merging pull requests.
We are always accepting of pull requests, but we do adhere to specific standards in regards to coding style, test driven development and commit messages.
GitHub is the preferred method of communication between members.
Otherwise, in order of preference:
- #bitcoinjs-dev:matrix.org on Matrix (A part of the #bitcoinjs-space:matrix.org "Space")
- #bitcoinjs on libera.chat IRC
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
- Push changes to your fork
- Submit a pull request to https://github.com/bitcoinjs/bitcoinjs-lib
Commits should be atomic and diffs easy to read.
If your pull request is accepted for merging, you may be asked by a maintainer to squash and or rebase your commits before it is merged.
Please refrain from creating several pull requests for the same change.
Patchsets should be focused:
* Adding a feature, or
* Fixing a bug, or
* Refactoring code.
If you combine these, the PR may be rejected or asked to be split up.
The length of time required for peer review is unpredictable and will vary from pull request to pull request.
Refer to the Git manual for any information about git
.
This library is written in TypeScript with eslint, prettier, and the tsc transpiler. These tools will help during testing to notice improper logic before committing and sending a pull request.
Some rules regarding TypeScript:
- Modify the typescript source code in an IDE that will give you warnings for transpile/lint errors.
- Once you are done with the modifications, run
npm run format
thennpm test
- Running the tests will transpile the ts files into js and d.ts files.
- Use
git diff
or other tools to verify that the ts and js are changing the same parts. - Commit all changes to ts, js, and d.ts files.
- Add tests where necessary.
- Submit your pull request.
Using TypeScript is for preventing bugs while writing code, as well as automatically generating type definitions. However, the JS file diffs must be verified, and any unverified JS will not be published to npm.
Bitcoin script payment/script templates are based on community consensus, but typically adhere to bitcoin-core node policy by default.
bitcoinjs.script.decompile
is consensus bound only, it does not reject based on policy.bitcoinjs.script.compile
will try to adhere to bitcoin-coreIsStandard
policies rules. (eg. minimalpush in bitcoinjs#638)
Any elliptic curve sign
operations should adhere to IsStandard
policies, like LOW_S
, but verify
should not reject them [by default].
If you need non-standard rejecting decoding
, you should use an external module, not this library.
Where "standards compliant" refers to the default policies of bitcoin-core, we adhere to the following:
- Any "creation" event must create standards-compliant data (standards bound)
- Any "validation" event must allow for non-standards compliant data (consensus bound)
For stricter validation, use an external module which we [may have] provided.