# Contributing

## Rules

There are a few basic ground-rules for contributors (including the maintainer(s) of the project):

- **No `--force` pushes** or modifying the Git history in any way. If you need to rebase, ensure you do it in your own repo.
- **Non-master branches**, prefixed with a short name moniker (e.g. `gav-my-feature`) must be used for ongoing work.
- **All modifications** must be made in a **pull-request** to solicit feedback from other contributors.
- A pull-request _must not be merged until CI_ has finished successfully.
- Contributors should adhere to the [house coding style](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot/wiki/Style-Guide).

### Merging pull requests once CI is successful

- A pull request that does not alter any logic (e.g. comments, dependencies, docs) may be tagged [`insubstantial`](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot/pulls?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=is%3Apr+is%3Aopen+label%3AA2-insubstantial) and merged by its author.
- A pull request with no large change to logic that is an urgent fix may be merged after a non-author contributor has reviewed it well.
- All other PRs should sit for 48 hours with the [`pleasereview`](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot/pulls?q=is:pr+is:open+label:A0-pleasereview) tag in order to garner feedback.
- No PR should be merged until all reviews' comments are addressed.

### Reviewing pull requests

When reviewing a pull request, the end-goal is to suggest useful changes to the author. Reviews should finish with approval unless there are issues that would result in:

- Buggy behavior.
- Undue maintenance burden.
- Breaking with house coding style.
- Pessimization (i.e. reduction of speed as measured in the projects benchmarks).
- Feature reduction (i.e. it removes some aspect of functionality that a significant minority of users rely on).
- Uselessness (i.e. it does not strictly add a feature or fix a known issue).

### Reviews may not be used as an effective veto for a PR because

- There exists a somewhat cleaner/better/faster way of accomplishing the same feature/fix.
- It does not fit well with some other contributors' longer-term vision for the project.

## Releases

Declaring formal releases remains the prerogative of the project maintainer(s).

## Changes to this arrangement

This is an experiment and feedback is welcome! This document may also be subject to pull-requests or changes by contributors where you believe you have something valuable to add or change.

## Heritage

These contributing guidelines are modified from the "OPEN Open Source Project" guidelines for the Level project: <https://github.com/Level/community/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md>
