VERGE 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.
If you're looking for somewhere to start contributing, check out the Issues list.
Most communication about VERGE development happens on Discord, in the #development channel. The easiest way to participate is by joining our Discord Server at this [link] (https://discordapp.com/invite/vergecurrency).
Discussion about code base improvements happens in GitHub issues and on pull requests.
Please use the following email - [email protected] to discuss complicated or controversial changes before working on a patch set.
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
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. Commit messages should be helpful to people reading your code in the future, so explain the reasoning for your decisions. Further explanation here.
If a particular commit references another issue, please add the reference. For
example: refs #1234 or fixes #4321. Using the fixes or closes keywords
will cause the corresponding issue to be closed when the pull request is merged.
Please refer to the Git manual for more information about Git.
- Push changes to your fork
- Create pull request
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.
Note: Code review is a burdensome but important part of the development process, and as such, certain types of pull requests are rejected. In general, if the improvements do not warrant the review effort required, the PR has a high chance of being rejected. It is up to the PR author to convince the reviewers that the changes warrant the review effort, and if reviewers are "Concept NAK'ing" the PR, the author may need to present arguments and/or do research backing their suggested changes.
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)
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.
Please refrain from creating several pull requests for the same change. Use the pull request that is already open (or was created earlier) to amend changes. This preserves the discussion and review that happened earlier for the respective change set.
The length of time required for peer review is unpredictable and will vary from pull request to 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.
There are three categories of refactoring, code only moves, code style fixes, code refactoring. In general refactoring pull requests should not mix these three kinds of activity in order to make refactoring pull requests easy to review and uncontroversial. In all cases, refactoring PRs must not change the behaviour of code within the pull request (bugs must be preserved as is).
Project maintainers aim for a quick turnaround on refactoring pull requests, so where possible keep them short, uncomplex and easy to verify.
Pull requests that refactor the code should not be made by new contributors. It requires a certain level of experience to know where the code belongs to and to understand the full ramification (including rebase effort of open pull requests).
Trivial pull requests or pull requests that refactor the code with no clear benefits may be immediately closed by the maintainers to reduce unnecessary workload on reviewing.
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;
- Have unit tests and functional tests where appropriate;
- Not break the existing test suite;
- Where bugs are fixed, where possible, there should be unit tests demonstrating the bug and also proving the fix. This helps prevent regression.
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 take into account the peer review when determining if there is consensus to merge a pull request (remember that discussions may have been spread out over GitHub, mailing list and Discord discussions). The following language is used within pull-request comments:
- ACK means "I have tested the code and I agree it should be merged";
- NACK means "I disagree this should be merged", and must be accompanied by sound technical justification (or in certain cases of copyright/patent/licensing issues, legal justification). NACKs without accompanying reasoning may be disregarded;
- utACK means "I have not tested the code, but I have reviewed it and it looks OK, I agree it can be merged";
- Concept ACK means "I agree in the general principle of this pull request";
- Nit refers to trivial, often non-blocking issues.
Reviewers should include the commit hash which they reviewed in their comments.
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 Bitcoin consensus, it must have been discussed extensively on the mailing list and Discord, be accompanied by a widely discussed BIP and have a generally widely perceived technical consensus of being a worthwhile change based on the judgement of the maintainers.
As most reviewers are themselves developers with their own projects, the review process can be quite lengthy, and some amount of patience is required. If you find that you've been waiting for a pull request to be given attention for several months, there may be a number of reasons for this, some of which you can do something about:
-
It may be because of a feature freeze due to an upcoming release. During this time, only bug fixes are taken into consideration. If your pull request is a new feature, it will not be prioritized until the release is over. Wait for release.
-
It may be because your code is too complex for all but a few people. And those people may not have realized your pull request even exists. A great way to find people who are qualified and care about the code you are touching is the Git Blame feature. Simply find the person touching the code you are touching before you and see if you can find them and give them a nudge. Don't be incessant about the nudging though.
-
Finally, if all else fails, ask on Discord or elsewhere for someone to give your pull request a look. If you think you've been waiting an unreasonably long amount of time (month+) for no particular reason (few lines changed, etc), this is totally fine. Try to return the favor when someone else is asking for feedback on their code, and universe balances out.
The project leader is the release manager for each 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.