damus/docs/CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing

Making contributions takes significant effort and time from both the contributor and the person who will review your work.

We made these guidelines to help you make successful contributions and avoid wasted time and effort! So even though it might require a bit of extra time to read these, it will likely save you a lot of time and headaches while making contributions.

Most of this comes from the linux kernel guidelines for submitting patches, we follow many of the same guidelines. These are very important! If you want your code to be accepted, please read these carefully

Choosing the scope of your contribution

Since reviews require time and effort from our busy team, it is important to carefully choose the scope of your work.

If your contributions are long and difficult to review and/or verify, or if they do not solve something that is of high priority for the team, you may find that your contributions may take much longer to get merged, or they may get rejected completely.

If this is your first time contributing, we strongly recommend starting small, and then working your way up to larger contributions as you get familiar with the entire process.

Submitting patches/PRs

Describe your problem. Whether your patch is a one-line bug fix or 5000 lines of a new feature, there must be an underlying problem that motivated you to do this work. Convince the reviewer that there is a problem worth fixing and that it makes sense for them to read past the first paragraph.

Once the problem is established, describe what you are actually doing about it in technical detail. It's important to describe the change in plain English for the reviewer to verify that the code is behaving as you intend it to.

The maintainer will thank you if you write your patch description in a form which can be easily pulled into Damus's source code tree.

Solve only one problem per patch. If your description starts to get long, that's a sign that you probably need to split up your patch. See the dedicated Separate your changes section because this is very important.

Describe your changes in imperative mood, e.g. "make xyzzy do frotz" instead of "[This patch] makes xyzzy do frotz" or "[I] changed xyzzy to do frotz", as if you are giving orders to the codebase to change its behaviour.

If your patch fixes a bug, use the 'Closes:' tag with a URL referencing the report in the mailing list archives or a public bug tracker. For example:

Closes: https://github.com/damus-io/damus/issues/1234

Some bug trackers have the ability to close issues automatically when a commit with such a tag is applied. Some bots monitoring mailing lists can also track such tags and take certain actions. Private bug trackers and invalid URLs are forbidden.

If your patch fixes a bug in a specific commit, e.g. you found an issue using git bisect, please use the 'Fixes:' tag with the first 12 characters of the SHA-1 ID, and the one line summary. Do not split the tag across multiple lines, tags are exempt from the "wrap at 75 columns" rule in order to simplify parsing scripts. For example::

Fixes: 54a4f0239f2e ("Fix crash in navigation")

The following git config settings can be used to add a pretty format for outputting the above style in the git log or git show commands::

[core]
	abbrev = 12
[pretty]
	fixes = Fixes: %h (\"%s\")

An example call::

$ git log -1 --pretty=fixes 54a4f0239f2e
Fixes: 54a4f0239f2e ("Fix crash in navigation")

Separate your changes

Separate each logical change into a separate patch.

For example, if your changes include both bug fixes and performance enhancements for a particular feature, separate those changes into two or more patches. If your changes include an API update, and a new feature which uses that new API, separate those into two patches.

On the other hand, if you make a single change to numerous files, group those changes into a single patch. Thus a single logical change is contained within a single patch.

The point to remember is that each patch should make an easily understood change that can be verified by reviewers. Each patch should be justifiable on its own merits.

When dividing your change into a series of patches, take special care to ensure that the Damus builds and runs properly after each patch in the series. Developers using git bisect to track down a problem can end up splitting your patch series at any point; they will not thank you if you introduce bugs in the middle.

If you cannot condense your patch set into a smaller set of patches, then only post say 15 or so at a time and wait for review and integration.

Include patch changelogs which describe what has changed between the v1 and v2 version of the patch.

Sign your work - the Developer's Certificate of Origin

To improve tracking of who did what, especially with patches that can percolate to their final resting place in the Damus through several layers of maintainers, we've introduced a "sign-off" procedure on patches that are being emailed around.

The sign-off is a simple line at the end of the explanation for the patch, which certifies that you wrote it 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:

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 saying:

Signed-off-by: Random J Developer <random@developer.example.org>

This will be done for you automatically if you use git commit -s. Reverts should also include "Signed-off-by". git revert -s does that for you.

Any further SoBs (Signed-off-by:'s) following the author's SoB are from people handling and transporting the patch, but were not involved in its development. SoB chains should reflect the real route a patch took as it was propagated to the maintainers and ultimately to Will, with the first SoB entry signalling primary authorship of a single author.

Add Changelog-Changed, Changelog-Fixed, etc

If you have a user facing change that you would like to include in Damus changelogs, please include:

• Changelog-Changed: Changed the heart button to a shaka
• Changelog-Fixed: Fixed notes not appearing on profile
• Changelog-Added: Added a cool new feature
• Changelog-Removed: Removed zaps

The changelog script will pick these up and give you attribution for your change

Testing

It is crucial that you properly test your changes. The reviewer needs to be convinced that your changes actually work, solve the issue at hand, and do not introduce new issues.

Therefore, with every PR/patch, you should include a report indicating what was tested, under what circumstances (e.g. Devices, devices, setup, etc.), and how.

The goal is not to overburden the contributor, but to allow the reviewer to independently verify the claims being made about the contribution as needed. Therefore, test reports should be specific enough that the reviewer can independently verify them.

The more complex and widespread your changes, the more testing it will require.

If the reviewer cannot verify your claims in a time-efficient manner, you may be asked to perform further testing, and/or experience delays.

DON'T: ❌ Provide vague test reports. ❌ Make big changes and not provide enough test coverage. ❌ Expect the reviewer to do a lot of testing on your behalf. ❌ Underestimate how much testing and polish bigger changes actually need.

DO: ✅ Provide enough details about your testing so that the reviewer can verify quality. ✅ Make it easy for the reviewer to understand that your changes actually work.

Recreating and root-causing issues

If your contribution tries to fix an existing issue, please try to ensure that you can recreate the original issue, or can reasonably prove its root cause with sound logic, before making the fix.

Without the ability to recreate the issue, it is near impossible to know if a successful test result is due to a successful fix, or simply "luck".

Ideally, there should be a specific test procedure that clearly fails before your changes, and clearly passes after your changes.

If you are solving an issue that is easy or "obvious" to recreate, you may not need this. However, if you are solving difficult or intermittent issues, this is very important. Many times it is where most of the work really is!

For intermittent issues, please perform several iterations of the tests until you can confidently assert the issue is really fixed.

DON'T: ❌ Claim an intermittent issue is fixed simply because some test procedure passes. ❌ Expect the reviewer to find the issue recreation steps for you.

DO: ✅ Find a procedure that recreates the issue before changes are applied. ✅ Be consistent with the procedure applied for issue recreation and fix verification. ✅ Run enough iterations of testing for intermittent issues. ✅ Provide sound reasoning for your fix when it is impractical to recreate the issue.

Submitting multiple PRs

Unless otherwise needed by our priorities and roadmap, our team will only work and prioritize one PR per author at a time to ensure every PR author has a chance to get their PR reviewed, and incentivize all contributors to prioritize driving existing PRs to the finish line.

If you submit multiple PRs at a time, our team will pick a PR to focus on first, and label other PRs as being on a "queue". If this happens, please focus on addressing issues on an existing PR over opening a new PR.

The above rule may be waived as needed by the team to fulfill its priorities.

AI-assisted contributions

We embrace and encourage new technologies and innovations in our product development. Therefore, AI-assisted contributions are welcome in this repository. However, AI-assisted submissions will be treated with the same standards and rigour as any other human-made submissions. Therefore, AI-assisted submissions must also follow all these guidelines.

If you do not have any Software Engineering experience, please consider the following:

• Make sure you have the proper rights to submit the AI-generated code.
• Make sure you are able to "own" your contributions — meaning that you can attend to requests and feedback our reviewers make.

Although we endeavour to be helpful when making requests back to PR/patch authors, we are under no obligation to provide extensive assistance to AI-assisted contributors who have significant gaps in their Software Engineering knowledge.

As mentioned at the top, we encourage all contributors to start with small contributions, to become familiar with the process. We believe this will increase your chances of success!

Questions about the guidelines

Feel free to ask our team about questions you may have regarding these guidelines, we will be happy to clarify any of the above items!

Thank you for contributing to Damus!