CONTRIBUTING.md

Contribution guidelines

Thank you for your interest in contributing to the ibc-proto-rs project! The goal of this project is maintain all the data structures relevant for interacting with on-chain IBC data.

All work on the code base should be motivated by a GitHub issue. Before opening a new issue, first do a search of open and closed issues to make sure that yours will not be a duplicate. If you would like to work on an issue which already exists, please indicate so by leaving a comment on the issue. If what you'd like to work on hasn't already been covered by an issue, then open a new one to get the process going.

The rest of this document outlines the best practices for contributing to this repository:

• Decision Making - process for agreeing to changes
• Issues - what makes a good issue
• Pull Requests - what makes a good pull request
• Forking - fork the repo to make pull requests
• Changelog - changes must be recorded in the changelog
• Releases - how to release new version of the crates

Decision Making

When contributing to the project, the following process leads to the best chance of landing the changes in main.

All new contributions should start with a GitHub issue which captures the problem you're trying to solve. Starting off with an issue allows for early feedback.

When the problem and the proposed solution are well understood, changes should start with a draft pull request against the branch main. The draft status signals that work is underway. When the work is ready for feedback, hitting "Ready for Review" will signal to the maintainers to take a look.

Implementation trajectories should aim to proceed where possible as a series of smaller incremental changes, in the form of small PRs that can be merged quickly. This helps manage the load for reviewers and reduces the likelihood that PRs will sit open for long periods of time.

Issues

We welcome bug reports, feature requests, and other contributions to our project. To open an issue, please follow these guidelines:

1. Search existing issues: Before opening a new issue, please search existing issues to ensure that is not a duplicates.

2. Provide a clear and descriptive title: This helps others understand the nature of the issue at a glance.

3. Provide detailed information: In the issue description, clearly state the purpose of the issue include as much information as possible, such as:

   • Steps to reproduce the issue
   • Expected behavior
   • Actual behavior
   • The version of the operating system and the software you are using
   • Error messages or logs (if applicable)

This assist us prioritize and categorize your issue more effectively and help others and reviewers understand the type and severity of the issue. If the issue you worked on was tagged A: low-priority, we'll do our best to review it in a timely manner, but please expect longer wait times for a review in general. If a low priority issue is important to you, please leave a comment explaining why, and we will reprioritize it!

Pull Requests

If you have write access to the ibc-proto-rs repo, you can directly branch off of main. This makes it easier for project maintainers to directly make changes to your branch should the need arise. Otherwise, check the Forking section for instructions.

Branch names should be prefixed with the author's name followed by a short description of the feature, eg. name/feature-x.

Pull requests are made against main and are squash-merged into it. Each PR should:

• make reference to an issue outlining the context
• update any relevant documentation and include tests
• add a corresponding entry in the .changelog directory using unclog, see the Changelog section for more details.

Additionally, in order to make PRs as easy to review as possible, each PR should:

• Be focused on implementing one piece of logic from end-to-end. It must be very clear what the purpose of the PR is from looking at the PR's title, description, and/or linked issue(s). It should also be very clear what value the changes incorporated in the PR aim to deliver. A single PR that does multiple things, without a clear articulation of the problem it attempts to solve, will very likely be rejected.
• Be small, ideally no more than 500 lines of code changes. While this is a guideline and not a hard rule, in general, larger changes should being structured as a series of PRs, each building off of the previous ones; these PRs should also be tracked in a tracking issue. If a single PR absolutely has to be larger, it must be structured such that it can be reviewed commit-by-commit, with each commit doing a single logical thing, accompanied with a good description of what it aims to achieve in the git commit message. Poorly structured PRs will likely be rejected on the grounds of being too much of a burden for the core maintainers to review; you will be asked to restructure the PR in accordance with the guidelines laid out here. This does not necessarily apply to documentation-related changes or automatically generated code (e.g. generated from Protobuf definitions). But automatically generated code changes should occur within separate commits, so they are easily distinguishable from manual code changes.

In order to help facilitate the PR review process, tag one person as the reviewer of the PR. If you are unsure of who to tag, your point of contact on the ibc-proto-rs team is always a natural candidate; they'll make sure that the PR gets reviewed by whomever is most appropriate to review it. It also helps to notify the person whom you tagged as reviewer through direct means, such as through Slack or Discord, as it is easy for GitHub notifications to get lost or buried.

Responsibilities of a PR Reviewer

If you're tagged as the reviewer of a PR, you are responsible for shepherding it through to completion. This includes fixing issues with the PR and taking the lead on decisions that need to be resolved in order to get the PR merged.

If you're tagged as a reviewer on a PR that affects a part of the code base that you are unfamiliar with, you can hand it off to someone (with their consent) who is more appropriate to shepherd the PR through to completion.

Forking

If you do not have write access to the repository, your contribution should be made through a fork on GitHub. Fork the repository, contribute to your fork (either in the main branch of the fork or in a separate branch), and then make a pull request back upstream.

When forking, add your fork's URL as a new git remote in your local copy of the repo. For instance, to create a fork and work on a branch of it:

• Create the fork on GitHub, using the fork button.
• cd to the original clone of the repo on your machine
• git remote rename origin upstream
• git remote add origin [email protected]:<location of fork>

Now origin refers to your fork and upstream refers to the original version. Now git push -u origin main to update the fork, and make pull requests against the original repo.

To pull in updates from the origin repo, run git fetch upstream followed by git rebase upstream/main (or whatever branch you're working in).

Changelog

Every non-trivial PR must update the CHANGELOG. This is accomplished indirectly by adding entries to the .changelog folder in unclog format using the unclog CLI tool. CHANGELOG.md will be built by whomever is responsible for performing a release just prior to release - this is to avoid changelog conflicts prior to releases.

Install unclog

cargo install unclog

Examples

Add a .changelog entry to signal that a bug was fixed, without mentioning any component.

unclog add -i update-unclog-instructions -s bug -n 1634 -m "Update CONTRIBUTING.md for latest version of unclog" --editor vim

Add a .changelog entry under the FEATURES section in CHANGELOG.md.

unclog add -s features --id a-new-feature --issue-no 1235 -m "msg about this new-feature" --editor vim

Preview unreleased changes

unclog build -u

The Changelog is not a record of what Pull Requests were merged; the commit history already shows that. The Changelog is a notice to users about how their expectations of the software should be modified. It is part of the UX of a release and is a critical user facing integration point. The Changelog must be clean, inviting, and readable, with concise, meaningful entries. Entries must be semantically meaningful to users. If a change takes multiple Pull Requests to complete, it should likely have only a single entry in the Changelog describing the net effect to the user. Instead of linking PRs directly, we instead prefer to log issues, which tend to be higher-level, hence more relevant for users.

When writing Changelog entries, ensure they are targeting users of the software, not fellow developers. Developers have much more context and care about more things than users do. Changelogs are for users.

Changelog structure is modeled after Tendermint Core and Hashicorp Consul. See those changelogs for examples.

We currently split changes for a given release between these four sections: Breaking Changes, Features, Improvements, and Bug Fixes.

Entries in the changelog should initially be logged in the Unreleased section, which represents a "staging area" for accumulating all the changes throughout a release (see Pull Requests below). With each release, the entries then move from this section into their permanent place under a specific release number in Changelog.

Changelog entries should be formatted as follows:

- Some description about the change ([#xxx](https://github.com/cosmos/ibc-proto-rs/issues/xxx)) (optional @contributor)

Here xxx is the issue number, and contributor is the author/s of the change.

It's also acceptable for xxx to refer to the relevant pull request, but issue numbers are preferred. Note this means issues (or pull-requests) should be opened first so the changelog can then be updated with the corresponding number.

Changelog entries should be ordered alphabetically numerically according to their issue/PR number.

Changes with multiple classifications should be doubly included (eg. a bug fix that is also a breaking change should be recorded under both).

Breaking changes are further subdivided according to the APIs/users they impact. Any change that effects multiple APIs/users should be recorded multiply - for instance, a change to some core protocol data structure might need to be reflected both as breaking the core protocol but also breaking any APIs where core data structures are exposed.

Releases

Our release process is as follows:

1. Update the changelog to reflect and summarize all changes in the release. This involves:
   1. Running unclog build -u and copy pasting the output at the top of the CHANGELOG.md file, making sure to update the header with the new version.
   2. Running unclog release vX.Y.Z to create a summary of all of the changes in this release.
   3. Committing the updated CHANGELOG.md file and .changelog directory to the repo.
2. Push this to a branch release/vX.Y.Z according to the version number of the anticipated release (e.g. release/v0.18.0) and open a draft PR.
3. Bump all relevant versions in the codebase to the new version and push these changes to the release PR. This includes:
   1. All Cargo.toml files (making sure dependencies' versions are updated too).
   2. All crates' lib.rs files documentation references' html_root_url parameters must point to the new version.
4. Run cargo doc --all-features --open locally to double-check that all the documentation compiles and is up-to-date and coherent. Fix any potential issues here and push them to the release PR.
5. Mark the PR as Ready for Review and incorporate feedback on the release.
6. Once approved, merge the PR.
7. Checkout the main and pull it with git checkout main && git pull origin main. Then create a signed tag and push it to GitHub: git tag -s -a vX.Y.Z && git push origin vX.Y.Z In the tag message, write the version and the link to the corresponding section of the changelog.
8. If any problem arises, submit a new PR, get it merged to main and try again. The reason for not releasing straight from the release branch, and therefore losing the ability to fix publishing-related problems as they arise, is that we would like the embedded metadata of the published crates, namely the Git commit at which the release was done, to match the Git commit on the main branch which will be tagged. See this article for a more in-depth explanation. Note: This step requires the appropriate privileges to push crates to crates.io.
9. Once the tag is pushed, wait for the CI bot to create a GitHub release, then update the release description to

   [📖 CHANGELOG](https://github.com/cosmos/ibc-proto-rs/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md#vXYZ)`
   

10. All done! 🎉