There are several ways you can contribute to XOD. This document is dedicated to contributing to code and issues. Other ways are described in the Contributor’s guide.
Review the issues and use the GitHub reactions to show your attitude. Issues with most reactions take a higher development priority.
Read the issues. If you see some flaws, inconsistencies, or ambiguities point to them in the issue’s comments.
See what’s coming next in the milestones section. If an issue is already there, you have a final chance to say “no-oooo!”
Before creating an issue check if a similar issue already exists.
There are few categories of issues in the XOD GitHub repository:
- Bugs: things that are definitely broken;
- Features: new functionality for end-users;
- Tweaks: an inconvenient, annoying behavior that more looks like a bug than a missing feature;
- Refactoring: notes on code improvements without changes in functionality;
- Chore: repository building, testing, maintenance, and DX improvements.
Classify issue you want to create in advance. If it’s more like a feature or an opinionated tweak, use XOD forum to discuss it. Features come from the Roadmap and community brainstorms. GitHub issues are things to be scheduled, tracked, and implemented, they are not a place for discussions.
If sure, start a new issue using the proper template.
Generally, any change in code should be related to a concrete issue. The common pipeline to get your changes into the master branch is:
- Create a new topic branch to work on the issue
- Write the code, do a series of commits
- Rebase on the
master
- Test and lint the code
- Create a pull request to the
master
- Wait for the code review, fix the code, rebase, force push
- Merge to the
master
and delete the topic branch
These steps are described below in details.
Any changes are delivered to XOD via pull requests. So any work should be done in a topic branch. Create a new branch like following:
$ git checkout -b fix-101-delete-empty-patch
Use <type>-<issue_number>-<slug>
notation for the branch name.
The type should reflect underlying issue category. Use one of: fix
(bug fix), feat
(user story implementation), tweak
, refactor
, or doc
.
Slug should shortly reflect the issue purpose.
Do use hyphens, lower case letters and digits, do not use slashes or any other symbols.
The code should follow some stylistic rules. These rules are based on Airbnb JavaScript Style Guide with slight modifications and enforcements. See ESLint configuration for details. To verify your code follows the rules run:
$ yarn run lint
In addition to the style ensure that new functionality is covered by unit tests.
Try to keep changes granular. One commit is a single completed portion of an improvement. A commit, in general, should not break any tests or linting rules.
We use simplified Angular-alike convention for commit messages. Subject line should have a form <type><scope>: <subject>
, e.g.
fix(xod-fs): allow empty node lists to be loaded correctly
The <type>
should be one of fix
(bug fix), feat
(new functionality), tweak
, refactor
, doc
, or chore
(general code maintenance).
The <scope>
should be a name of a package affected by the change. If the change affects several packages, separate them with commas (no spaces).
For the <subject>
text:
- Use imperative, present tense: “change” not “changed” nor “changes”
- Don’t capitalize the first letter
- No dot (
.
) at the end
Try to keep the whole subject line under 72 symbols.
To keep history clean we rebase topic branches rather than merge. Once you want to synchronize with the master
going ahead do:
$ git checkout master
$ git pull
$ git checkout <feature-branch-name>
$ git rebase master
Follow Git hints to resolve any conflicts.
There is a series of checks that should be passed for the code to have a chance to be merged into master
. They are unit tests, linting and possibly other things.
Run yarn run verify
to make sure your code doesn’t break anything.
The checks are performed by Circle CI in any case, but ensuring your PR would not break anything in advance is a good habit.
Use GitHub interface to create a pull request from the topic branch to the master
branch.
Fill in the proposed PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.
We strive to review any PR in one day. To be approved a PR should sustain a review by at least one team member. Bigger PR’s are reviewed by at least two members.
Very likely, there will be code issues that should be fixed before the merge. We’ll try to describe them as friendly as possible. Fix the issues and add the commits to the same PR.
It could also happen that the PR is no longer can be merged into the master
automatically because the HEAD went ahead. In this case, rebase on master again and push with --force
. Yes, you’ll rewrite a history, but as an author of the topic branch, you’re the king of your changes.
Once the PR is good, it would be merged into the master branch.
It’s better to delete the merged branch to keep the repository clean. Any new contributions related to the same topic may be performed by passing the whole pipeline again.