The Polkadot SDK
project is an OPENISH Open Source Project
Individuals making significant and valuable contributions are given commit-access to the project. Contributions are done via pull-requests and need to be approved by the maintainers.
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. No rewriting of the history after the code has been shared (e.g. through a Pull-Request). - 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.
- Contributors should adhere to the house documenting style, when applicable.
- A Pull Request (PR) needs to be reviewed and approved by project maintainers.
- If a change does not alter any logic (e.g. comments, dependencies, docs), then it may be tagged
A1-insubstantial
and merged faster. - No PR should be merged until all reviews' comments are addressed.
The set of labels and their description can be found here.
- Please use our Pull Request Template and make sure all relevant information is reflected in your PR.
- Please tag each PR with minimum one
T*
label. The respectiveT*
labels should signal the component that was changed, they are also used by downstream users to track changes and to include these changes properly into their own releases. - If you’re still working on your PR, please submit as “Draft”. Once a PR is ready for review change the status to “Open”, so that the maintainers get to review your PR. Generally PRs should sit for 48 hours in order to garner feedback. It may be merged before if all relevant parties had a look at it.
- With respect to auditing, please see AUDIT.md. In general, merging to master can happen independently of audit.
- PRs will be able to be merged once all reviewers' comments are addressed and CI is successful.
Noting breaking changes: When breaking APIs, the PR description should mention what was changed alongside some examples on how to change the code to make it work/compile. It should also mention potential storage migrations and if they require some special setup aside from adding it to the list of migrations in the runtime.
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).
The reviewers are also responsible to check:
- if the PR description is well written to facilitate integration, in case it contains breaking changes.
- the PR has an impact on docs.
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.
All Pull Requests must contain proper title & description, as described in Pull Request
Template. Moreover, all pull requests must have a proper prdoc
file attached.
Some Pull Requests can be exempt of prdoc
documentation, those must be labelled with
R0-silent
.
Non "silent" PRs must come with documentation in the form of a .prdoc
file.
See more about prdoc
here
The Polkadot SDK uses many conventions when configuring a crate. Watch out for these things when you are creating a new crate.
Chain-specific crates, for example
bp-bridge-hub-rococo
, should not be released as part of the Polkadot-SDK umbrella crate. We have a custom metadata
attribute that is picked up by the generate-umbrella.py
script, that should be applied to all chain-specific crates like such:
[package]
# Other stuff...
[package.metadata.polkadot-sdk]
exclude-from-umbrella = true
# Other stuff...
Test or example crates, like
pallet-example-task
, should not be released to crates.io. To ensure this, you must add publish = false
to your
crate's package
section:
[package]
# Other stuff...
publish = false
# Other stuff...
We use labels to manage PRs and issues and communicate state of a PR. Please familiarise yourself with them. Best way to get started is to a pick a ticket tagged easy or medium and get going. Alternatively, look out for issues tagged mentor and get in contact with the mentor offering their support on that larger task.
If what you are looking for is an answer rather than proposing a new feature or fix, search https://substrate.stackexchange.com to see if an post already exists, and ask if not. Please do not file support issues here.
Before opening a new issue search to see if a similar one already exists and leave a comment that you also experienced this issue or add your specifics that are related to an existing issue.
Please label issues with the following labels (only relevant for maintainer):
I*
issue severity and type. EXACTLY ONE REQUIRED.D*
issue difficulty, suggesting the level of complexity this issue has. AT MOST ONE ALLOWED.T*
Issue topic. MULTIPLE ALLOWED.
Declaring formal releases remains the prerogative of the project maintainer(s). See RELEASE.md.
UI tests are used for macros to ensure that the output of a macro doesn’t change and is in the expected format. These UI
tests are sensible to any changes in the macro generated code or to switching the rust stable version. The tests are
only run when the RUN_UI_TESTS
environment variable is set. So, when the CI is for example complaining about failing
UI tests and it is expected that they fail these tests need to be executed locally. To simplify the updating of the UI
test output there is a script
./scripts/update-ui-tests.sh
to update the tests for a current rust version locally./scripts/update-ui-tests.sh 1.70
# to update the tests for a specific rust version locally
Or if you have opened PR and you're member of paritytech
- you can use /cmd
to run the tests for you in CI:
/cmd update-ui
- will run the tests for the current rust version/cmd update-ui --image docker.io/paritytech/ci-unified:bullseye-1.70.0-2023-05-23
- will run the tests for the specified rust version and specified image
We use zepter to enforce features are propagated between crates correctly.
If you're member of paritytech org - you can use command-bot to run various of common commands in CI:
Start with comment in PR: /cmd --help
to see the list of available commands.
When deprecating and removing code you need to be mindful of how this could impact downstream developers. In order to mitigate this impact, it is recommended to adhere to the steps outlined in the Deprecation Checklist.