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Contributing

Thank you for your interest in contributing to the Hermes IBC relayer! The goal of this project is to provide a high quality, formally verified IBC relayer implementation in Rust.

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. Please do your best to ensure that your issue adheres to one of the issue templates that we have in the repository.

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

Core Team Responsibility

The Hermes core team is responsible for stewarding this project over time. This means that the core team needs to understand the nature of, and agree to maintain, all of the changes that land on the master branch. It may cost a few days or weeks' worth of time to submit a particular change, but maintaining that change over the years has a much higher cost that the core team is responsible for bearing.

With that in mind, the core team must balance the potential risks of maintaining any contribution in the long-term against the immediate usefulness or utility that that contribution manifests.

Decision Making

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

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. Once the issue is created, maintainers may request that more detailed documentation be written in the form of a Request for Comment (RFC) or an Architectural Decision Record (ADR).

Discussion at the RFC stage will build collective understanding of the dimensions of the problem and help structure conversations around trade-offs.

When the problem is well understood but the solution leads to large structural changes to the code base, these changes should be proposed in the form of an Architectural Decision Record (ADR). The ADR will help build consensus on an overall strategy to ensure that the code base maintains coherence in the larger context. If you are not comfortable with writing an ADR, you can open a regular issue and the maintainers will help you turn it into an ADR.

When the problem and the proposed solution are well understood, changes should start with a draft pull request against master. 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.

Contributing flow

Each stage of the process is aimed at creating feedback cycles which align contributors and maintainers in order to ensure that:

  • Contributors don’t waste their time implementing/proposing features which won’t land in master
  • Maintainers have the necessary context in order to support and review contributions

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)

  4. Use appropriate labels: Assign relevant labels to indicate:

    • (WHY) The purpose or objective of this issue with Objective-level "O" labels like O: security, O: new-feature, etc.
    • (WHICH) The part of the system this issue relates to using:
      • External-level "E" labels if the issue fall outside the current scope of the system and is related to external dependencies or projects like E: non-cosmos, E: no-std etc.
      • or "Internal-level "I" labels for anything related to the current scope of the product like I: logic, I: documentation, I: rpc, etc.
    • (HOW) If any administrative considerations should be taken into account use Administrative-level "A" labels like A: critical, A: help-wanted, A: risky, etc.

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 Hermes repo, you can directly branch off of master. 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 master and are squash-merged into master. 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 be 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 Hermes 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 master 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 master 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/master (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 for the ibc-relayer-cli crate (the component in the relayer-cli directory) under the FEATURES section in CHANGELOG.md.

unclog add -c ibc-relayer-cli -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:

- [pkg] Some description about the change ([#xxx](https://github.com/informalsystems/hermes/issues/xxx)) (optional @contributor)

Here, pkg is the part of the code that changed (typically a top-level crate, but could be <crate>/<module>), 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 according to the pkg, and 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.
    3. Every reference to Hermes version in the guide.
  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. Pull master and run the release.sh script. If any problem arises, submit a new PR, get it merged to master 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 master 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.
  8. Once all crates have been successfully released, create a signed tag and push it to GitHub: git tag -s -a vX.Y.Z. In the tag message, write the version and the link to the corresponding section of the changelog.
  9. Once the tag is pushed, wait for the CI bot to create a GitHub release, and update the release description to [📖 CHANGELOG](https://github.com/informalsystems/hermes/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md#vXYZ).
  10. Wait an hour or so, and check that the CI job has uploaded the Hermes binaries to the release.
  11. All done! 🎉