= Contributing

The `Substrate` project is an **OPENISH Open Source Project**

== What?

Individuals making significant and valuable contributions are given commit-access to a project to contribute as they see fit. A project is more like an open wiki than a standard guarded open source project.

== Rules

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

. **No `--force` pushes** or modifying the master branch 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 https://wiki.parity.io/Substrate-Style-Guide[house coding style].


== Merge Process

Merging pull requests once CI is successful:

. A PR needs to be reviewed and approved by project maintainers unless:
	- it does not alter any logic (e.g. comments, dependencies, docs), then it may be tagged https://github.com/paritytech/substrate/pulls?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=is%3Apr+is%3Aopen+label%3AA2-insubstantial[`insubstantial`] and merged by its author once CI is complete.
  - it is an urgent fix with no large change to logic, then it may be merged after a non-author contributor has approved the review once CI is complete.

. Once a PR is ready for review please add the https://github.com/paritytech/substrate/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aopen+label%3AA0-pleasereview[`pleasereview`] label. Generally PRs should sit with this label for 48 hours in order to garner feedback. It may be merged before if all relevant parties had a look at it.
. If the first review is not an approval, swap `A0-pleasereview` to any label `[A3, A7]` to indicate that the PR has received some feedback, but needs further work. For example. https://github.com/paritytech/substrate/labels/A3-inprogress[`A3-inprogress`] is a general indicator that the PR is work in progress and https://github.com/paritytech/substrate/labels/A4-gotissues[`A4-gotissues`] means that it has significant problems that need fixing. Once the work is done, change the label back to `A0-pleasereview`. You might end up swapping a few times back and forth to climb up the A label group. Once a PR is https://github.com/paritytech/substrate/labels/A8-looksgood[`A8-looksgood`], it is ready to merge. 
. PRs that break the external API must be tagged with https://github.com/paritytech/substrate/labels/B2-breaksapi[`breaksapi`], when it changes the FRAME or consensus of running system with https://github.com/paritytech/substrate/labels/B3-breaksconsensus[`breaksconsensus`]
. 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.

=== Updating Polkadot as well

If your PR changes the external APIs or interfaces used by Polkadot, **a corresponding PR on Polkadot must** be submitted as well. If you tagged the PR with `breaksapi` or `breaksconsensus` this is most certainly the case, in all other cases check for it by running step 1.

To update a corresponding Polkadot PR:

0. Pull latest Polkadot master (or clone it, if you haven't yet).
1. Replace `polkadot-master` in all `Cargo.toml` with the name of the PR-branch - e.g. by running `find . -name "Cargo.toml" -exec sed -i "s/polkadot-master/PR_BRANCH/g" {}` (and to your repo, if the branch is not on mainline); Commit this change.
2. Make the changes required to pass the build again.
3. Submit all this as a PR against the Polkadot Repo, link that new PR in the existing substrate PR for reference
4. Wait for reviews on both
5. Once both PRs have been green lit, merge the Substrate PR into master and sync the changes onto the `polkadot-master` on mainline (push it). Now revert that first commit in your Polkadot PR, reverting the name back to `polkadot-master`, push and wait for the CI to confirm all is fine. Then merge the Polkadot PR.

As there might be multiple pending PRs that might conflict with one another, a) you should not merge the substrate PR until the Polkadot PR has also been reviewed and b) both should be merged pretty quickly after another to not block others.

== Helping out

We use https://github.com/paritytech/substrate/labels[labels] to manage PRs and issues and communicate state of a PR. Please familiarize yourself with them. Furthermore we are organizing issues in https://github.com/paritytech/substrate/milestones[milestones]. Best way to get started is to a pick a ticket from the current milestone tagged https://github.com/paritytech/substrate/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+label%3AQ2-easy[`easy`] or https://github.com/paritytech/substrate/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+label%3AQ3-medium[`medium`] and get going or https://github.com/paritytech/substrate/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+label%3AX1-mentor[`mentor`] and get in contact with the mentor offering their support on that larger task.

== 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
