laconicd/CONTRIBUTING.md

Ethermint Contributor Guidelines

• General Procedure
• Architecture Decision Records (ADR)
• Forking
• Dependencies
• Protobuf
• Development Procedure
• Testing
• Updating Documentation
• Branching Model and Release
  • PR Targeting
  • Pull Requests
  • Process for reviewing PRs
  • Pull Merge Procedure
  • Release Procedure

General Procedure

Thank you for considering making contributions to Ethermint and related repositories!

Ethermint uses Tendermint’s coding repo for overall information on repository workflow and standards.

Contributing to this repo can mean many things such as participating in discussion or proposing code changes. To ensure a smooth workflow for all contributors, the following general procedure for contributing has been established:

1. Either open or find an issue you have identified and would like to contribute to resolving.
2. Participate in thoughtful discussion on that issue.
3. If you would like to contribute:
   1. If the issue is a proposal, ensure that the proposal has been accepted by the Ethermint team.
   2. Ensure that nobody else has already begun working on the same issue. If someone already has, please make sure to contact the individual to collaborate.
   3. If nobody has been assigned the issue and you would like to work on it, make a comment on the issue to inform the community of your intentions to begin work. Ideally, wait for confirmation that no one has started it. However, if you are eager and do not get a prompt response, feel free to dive on in!
   4. Follow standard Github best practices:
      1. Fork the repo
      2. Branch from the HEAD of development(For core developers working within the ethermint repo, to ensure a clear ownership of branches, branches must be named with the convention {moniker}/{issue#}-branch-name).
      3. Make commits
      4. Submit a PR to development
   5. Be sure to submit the PR in Draft mode. Submit your PR early, even if it's incomplete as this indicates to the community you're working on something and allows them to provide comments early in the development process.
   6. When the code is complete it can be marked Ready for Review.
   7. Be sure to include a relevant change log entry in the Unreleased section of CHANGELOG.md (see file for log format).
   8. Please make sure to run make format before every commit - the easiest way to do this is having your editor run it for you upon saving a file. Additionally, please ensure that your code is lint compliant by running make lint . There are CI tests built into the Ethermint repository and all PR’s will require that these tests pass before they are able to be merged.

Note: for very small or blatantly obvious problems (such as typos), it is not required to open an issue to submit a PR, but be aware that for more complex problems/features, if a PR is opened before an adequate design discussion has taken place in a github issue, that PR runs a high likelihood of being rejected.

Looking for a good place to start contributing? How about checking out some good first issues.

Architecture Decision Records (ADR)

When proposing an architecture decision for Ethermint, please create an ADR so further discussions can be made. We are following this process so all involved parties are in agreement before any party begins coding the proposed implementation. If you would like to see some examples of how these are written refer to Tendermint ADRs.

Forking

Please note that Go requires code to live under absolute paths, which complicates forking. While my fork lives at https://github.com/tharsis/ethermint, the code should never exist at $GOPATH/src/github.com/tharsis/ethermint. Instead, we use git remote to add the fork as a new remote for the original repo,$GOPATH/src/github.com/cosmos/ethermint, and do all the work there.

For instance, to create a fork and work on a branch of it, you would:

1. Create the fork on github, using the fork button.
2. Go to the original repo checked out locally. (i.e. $GOPATH/src/github.com/cosmos/ethermint)
3. git remote rename origin upstream
4. git remote add origin git@github.com:tharsis/ethermint.git

Now origin refers to my fork and upstream refers to the ethermint version. So I can git push -u origin master to update my fork, and make pull requests to ethermint from there. Of course, replace tharsis with your git handle.

To pull in updates from the origin repo, run:

1. git fetch upstream
2. git rebase upstream/master (or whatever branch you want)

Please NO DOT make Pull Requests from development.

Dependencies

We use Go 1.15 Modules to manage dependency versions.

The master branch of every Cosmos repository should just build with go get, which means they should be kept up-to-date with their dependencies, so we can get away with telling people they can just go get our software.

Since some dependencies are not under our control, a third party may break our build, in which case we can fall back on go mod tidy -v.

Protobuf

We use Protocol Buffers along with gogoproto to generate code for use in Ethermint.

For deterministic behavior around Protobuf tooling, everything is containerized using Docker. Make sure to have Docker installed on your machine, or head to Docker's website to install it.

For formatting code in .proto files, you can run make proto-format command.

For linting and checking breaking changes, we use buf. You can use the commands make proto-lint and make proto-check-breaking to respectively lint your proto files and check for breaking changes.

To generate the protobuf stubs, you can run make proto-gen.

We also added the make proto-all command to run all the above commands sequentially.

In order for imports to properly compile in your IDE, you may need to manually set your protobuf path in your IDE's workspace settings/config.

For example, in vscode your .vscode/settings.json should look like:

{
  "protoc": {
    "options": [
      "--proto_path=${workspaceRoot}/proto",
      "--proto_path=${workspaceRoot}/third_party/proto"
    ]
  }
}

Development Procedure

1. The latest state of development is on development.
2. development must never fail make lint, make test, make test-race, make test-rpc, make test-solidity, make test-import
3. No --force onto development (except when reverting a broken commit, which should seldom happen).
4. Create your feature branch from development either on github.com/cosmos/ethermint, or your fork ( using git remote add origin).
5. Before submitting a pull request, begin git rebase on top of development.

Testing

Ethermint uses GitHub Actions for automated testing.

Updating Documentation

If you open a PR on the Ethermint repo, it is mandatory to update the relevant documentation in /docs. Please refer to the docs subdirectory and make changes accordingly. Prior to approval, the Code owners/approvers may request some updates to specific docs.

Branching Model and Release

User-facing repos should adhere to the trunk based development branching model.

Libraries need not follow the model strictly, but would be wise to.

Ethermint utilizes semantic versioning.

PR Targeting

Ensure that you base and target your PR on the development branch.

All feature additions should be targeted against development. Bug fixes for an outstanding release candidate should be targeted against the release candidate branch.

Pull Requests

To accommodate the review process, we suggest that PRs are categorically broken up. Ideally each PR addresses only a single issue. Additionally, as much as possible code refactoring and cleanup should be submitted as separate PRs from bug fixes/feature-additions.

Process for reviewing PRs

All PRs require two Reviews before merge. When reviewing PRs, please use the following review explanations:

1. LGTM without an explicit approval means that the changes look good, but you haven't pulled down the code, run tests locally and thoroughly reviewed it.
2. Approval through the GH UI means that you understand the code, documentation/spec is updated in the right places, you have pulled down and tested the code locally. In addition:
   • You must think through whether any added code could be partially combined (DRYed) with existing code.
   • You must think through any potential security issues or incentive-compatibility flaws introduced by the changes.
   • Naming convention must be consistent with the rest of the codebase.
   • Code must live in a reasonable location, considering dependency structures (e.g. not importing testing modules in production code, or including example code modules in production code).
   • If you approve of the PR, you are responsible for fixing any of the issues mentioned here.
3. If you are only making "surface level" reviews, submit any notes as Comments without adding a review.

Pull Merge Procedure

1. Ensure pull branch is rebased on development.
2. Run make test to ensure that all tests pass.
3. Squash merge pull request.

Release Procedure

1. Start on development.
2. Create the release candidate branch rc/v* (going forward known as RC) and ensure it's protected against pushing from anyone except the release manager/coordinator. No PRs targeting this branch should be merged unless exceptional circumstances arise.
3. On the RC branch, prepare a new version section in the CHANGELOG.md. All links must be link-ified:
   $ python ./scripts/linkify_changelog.py CHANGELOG.md
   Copy the entries into a RELEASE_CHANGELOG.md. This is needed so the bot knows which entries to add to the release page on github.
4. Kick off a large round of simulation testing (e.g. 400 seeds for 2k blocks).
5. If errors are found during the simulation testing, commit the fixes to development and create a new RC branch ( making sure to increment the rcN).
6. After simulation has successfully completed, create the release branch (release/vX.XX.X) from the RC branch.
7. Create a PR to development to incorporate the CHANGELOG.md updates.
8. Tag the release (use git tag -a) and create a release in Github.
9. Delete the RC branches.

Note: tharsis’s Ethermint team currently cuts releases on a need to have basis. We will announce a more standardized release schedule as we near production readiness.