🎈 Thanks for your help improving the project! We are so happy to have you!
There are opportunities to contribute to Pilota at any level. It doesn't matter if you are just getting started with Rust or are the most weathered expert, we can use your help.
No contribution is too small and all contributions are valued.
This guide will help you get started. Do not let this guide intimidate you. It should be considered a map to help you navigate the process.
The develop discussion group on Feishu is available for any concerns not covered in this guide, please join us!
This guide is adapted from the Tokio contributing guide.
See the Pilota Code of Conduct.
For any issue, there are fundamentally three ways an individual can contribute:
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By opening the issue for discussion: For instance, if you believe that you have discovered a bug in Pilota, creating a new issue in the cloudwego/pilota issue tracker is the way to report it.
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By helping to triage the issue: This can be done by providing supporting details (a test case that demonstrates a bug), providing suggestions on how to address the issue, or ensuring that the issue is tagged correctly.
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By helping to resolve the issue: Typically this is done either in the form of demonstrating that the issue reported is not a problem after all, or more often, by opening a Pull Request that changes some bit of something in Pilota in a concrete and reviewable manner.
Anybody can participate in any stage of contribution. We urge you to participate in the discussion around bugs and participate in reviewing PRs.
If you have reviewed existing documentation and still have questions or are having problems, you can either:
- Submit a new issue and describes your problem, or
- Join the Pilota user group on Feishu and ask for help there.
In exchange for receiving help, we expect you to contribute back a documentation PR that helps others avoid the problems that you encountered.
When opening a new issue in the Pilota issue tracker, you will be presented with a basic template that should be filled in. If you believe that you have uncovered a bug, please fill out this form, following the template to the best of your ability. Do not worry if you cannot answer every detail, just fill in what you can.
The two most important pieces of information we need in order to properly evaluate the report is a description of the behavior you are seeing and a simple test case we can use to recreate the problem on our own. If we cannot recreate the issue, it becomes impossible for us to fix.
In order to rule out the possibility of bugs introduced by userland code, test cases should be limited, as much as possible, to using only Pilota APIs.
See How to create a Minimal, Complete, and Verifiable example.
Once an issue has been opened, it is not uncommon for there to be discussion around it. Some contributors may have differing opinions about the issue, including whether the behavior being seen is a bug or a feature. This discussion is part of the process and should be kept focused, helpful, and professional.
Short, clipped responses—that provide neither additional context nor supporting detail—are not helpful or professional. To many, such responses are simply annoying and unfriendly.
Contributors are encouraged to help one another make forward progress as much as possible, empowering one another to solve issues collaboratively. If you choose to comment on an issue that you feel either is not a problem that needs to be fixed, or if you encounter information in an issue that you feel is incorrect, explain why you feel that way with additional supporting context, and be willing to be convinced that you may be wrong. By doing so, we can often reach the correct outcome much faster.
In the majority of cases, issues are resolved by opening a Pull Request. The process for opening and reviewing a Pull Request is similar to that of opening and triaging issues, but carries with it a necessary review and approval workflow that ensures that the proposed changes meet the minimal quality and functional guidelines of the Pilota project.
Pull Requests are the way concrete changes are made to the code, documentation, and dependencies in the Pilota repository.
Even tiny pull requests (e.g., one character pull request fixing a typo in API documentation) are greatly appreciated. Before making a large change, it is usually a good idea to first open an issue describing the change to solicit feedback and guidance. This will increase the likelihood of the PR getting merged.
If the change being proposed alters code (as opposed to only documentation for example), it is either adding new functionality to Pilota or it is fixing existing, broken functionality. In both of these cases, the pull request should include one or more tests to ensure that Pilota does not regress in the future.
Ideally, every API has at least one documentation test that demonstrates how to
use the API. Documentation tests are run with cargo test --doc. This ensures
that the example is correct and provides additional test coverage.
The trick to documentation tests is striking a balance between being succinct for a reader to understand and actually testing the API.
It is a recommended best practice to keep your changes as logically grouped as possible within individual commits. There is no limit to the number of commits any single Pull Request may have, and many contributors find it easier to review changes that are split across multiple commits.
That said, if you have a number of commits that are "checkpoints" and don't represent a single logical change, please squash those together.
Note that multiple commits often get squashed when they are landed (see the notes about commit squashing).
We also recommend you to update the CHANGELOG.md of the crate you are changing together with your commits to keep track of every change.
A good commit message should describe what changed and why, also known as the Conventional Commits.
- The first line should:
- contain the type and a short description of the change (preferably 50 characters or less, and no more than 72 characters)
- be entirely in lowercase with the exception of proper nouns, acronyms, and the words that refer to code, like function/variable names
Examples:
- feat: allow users to use custom plugin
- fix(compiler): fix panic when parsing invalid idl file
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Keep the second line blank.
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Wrap all other lines at 72 columns (except for long URLs).
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If your patch fixes an open issue, you can add a reference to it at the end of the log. Use the
Fixes: #prefix and the issue number. For other references useRefs: #.Refsmay include multiple issues, separated by a comma.Examples:
Fixes: #1337Refs: #1234
Sample complete commit message:
fix(compiler): fix panic when parsing invalid idl file
Body of commit message is a few lines of text, explaining things
in more detail, possibly giving some background about the issue
being fixed, etc.
The body of the commit message can be several paragraphs, and
please do proper word-wrap and keep columns shorter than about
72 characters or so. That way, `git log` will show things
nicely even when it is indented.
Fixes: #1337
Refs: #453, #154From within GitHub, opening a new Pull Request will present you with a template that should be filled out. Please try to do your best at filling out the details, but feel free to skip parts if you're not sure what to put.
You will probably get feedback or requests for changes to your Pull Request. This is a big part of the submission process so don't be discouraged! Some contributors may sign off on the Pull Request right away, others may have more detailed comments or feedback. This is a necessary part of the process in order to evaluate whether the changes are correct and necessary.
Any community member can review a PR and you might get conflicting feedback. Keep an eye out for comments from code owners to provide guidance on conflicting feedback.
Once the PR is open, do not rebase the commits. See Commit Squashing for more details.
In most cases, do not squash commits that you add to your Pull Request during the review process. When the commits in your Pull Request land, they may be squashed into one commit per logical change. Metadata will be added to the commit message (including links to the Pull Request, links to relevant issues, and the names of the reviewers). The commit history of your Pull Request, however, will stay intact on the Pull Request page.
Any Pilota community member is welcome to review any pull request.
All Pilota contributors who choose to review and provide feedback on Pull Requests have a responsibility to both the project and the individual making the contribution. Reviews and feedback must be helpful, insightful, and geared towards improving the contribution as opposed to simply blocking it. If there are reasons why you feel the PR should not land, explain what those are. Do not expect to be able to block a Pull Request from advancing simply because you say "No" without giving an explanation. Be open to having your mind changed. Be open to working with the contributor to make the Pull Request better.
Reviews that are dismissive or disrespectful of the contributor or any other reviewers are strictly counter to the Code of Conduct.
When reviewing a Pull Request, the primary goals are for the codebase to improve and for the person submitting the request to succeed. Even if a Pull Request does not land, the submitters should come away from the experience feeling like their effort was not wasted or unappreciated. Every Pull Request from a new contributor is an opportunity to grow the community.
Do not overwhelm new contributors.
It is tempting to micro-optimize and make everything about relative performance, perfect grammar, or exact style matches. Do not succumb to that temptation.
Focus first on the most significant aspects of the change:
- Does this change make sense for Pilota?
- Does this change make Pilota better, even if only incrementally?
- Are there clear bugs or larger scale issues that need attending to?
- Is the commit message readable and correct? If it contains a breaking change is it clear enough?
Note that only incremental improvement is needed to land a PR. This means that the PR does not need to be perfect, only better than the status quo. Follow up PRs may be opened to continue iterating.
When changes are necessary, request them, do not demand them, and do not assume that the submitter already knows how to add a test or run a benchmark.
Specific performance optimization techniques, coding styles and conventions change over time. The first impression you give to a new contributor never does.
Nits (requests for small changes that are not essential) are fine, but try to avoid stalling the Pull Request. Most nits can typically be fixed by the Pilota Collaborator landing the Pull Request but they can also be an opportunity for the contributor to learn a bit more about the project.
It is always good to clearly indicate nits when you comment: e.g.
Nit: change foo() to bar(). But this is not blocking.
If your comments were addressed but were not folded automatically after new commits or if they proved to be mistaken, please, hide them with the appropriate reason to keep the conversation flow concise and relevant.
Be aware that how you communicate requests and reviews in your feedback can have a significant impact on the success of the Pull Request. Yes, we may land a particular change that makes Pilota better, but the individual might just not want to have anything to do with Pilota ever again. The goal is not just having good code.
If a Pull Request appears to be abandoned or stalled, it is polite to first
check with the contributor to see if they intend to continue the work before
checking if they would mind if you took it over (especially if it just has nits
left). When doing so, it is courteous to give the original contributor credit
for the work they started (either by preserving their name and email address in
the commit log, or by using an Author: meta-data tag in the commit.
Adapted from the Node.js contributing guide.
The Pilota GitHub repository has a lot of issues and PRs to keep track of. This section explains the meaning of various labels. The section is primarily targeted at maintainers. Most contributors aren't able to set these labels.
The area label describes the crates relevant to this issue or PR.
- A-pilota This issue concerns the main
pilotacrate. - A-pilota-build This issue concerns the
pilota-buildcrate. - A-pilota-thrift-parser This issue concerns the
pilota-thrift-parsercrate. - A-ci This issue concerns our GitHub Actions setup.
- C-bug This is a bug-report. Bug-fix PRs use
C-enhancementinstead. - C-enhancement This is a PR that adds a new feature or fixes a bug.
- C-maintenance This is an issue or PR about stuff such as documentation, GitHub Actions or code quality.
- C-feature-request This is a feature request issue. Implementations of feature
requests use
C-enhancementinstead. - C-feature-accepted If you submit a PR for this feature request, we wont
close it with the reason "we don't want this". Issues with this label should
also have the
C-feature-requestlabel. - C-musing Stuff like tracking issues or roadmaps. "musings about a better world".
- C-proposal A proposal of some kind, and a request for comments.
- C-question A user question.
- C-request A non-feature request, e.g. "please document the usage of xx".
- E-help-wanted Stuff where we want help. Often seen together with
C-bugorC-feature-accepted. - E-easy This is easy, ranging from quick documentation fixes to stuff you can do after reading the tutorial on our website.
- E-medium This is neither
E-easynotE-hard. - E-hard This either involves very tricky code, is something we don't know how to solve, or is difficult for some other reason.
- E-needs-mvce This bug is missing a minimal complete and verifiable example.
The "E-" prefix is the same as used in the Rust compiler repository. Some issues are missing a difficulty rating, but feel free to ask in our dev group if you want to know how difficult an issue likely is.
There are also some tags that are used to provide additional information.
- T-duplicate This is a duplicate of another issue.
- T-wontfix This issue is not a bug, which will not be worked on.
- T-invalid This issue is invalid.
- T-good-first-issue This issue is good for newcomers.
We adheres the Semantic Versioning 2.0.
Since the Pilota project consists of a number of crates, many of which depend on each other, releasing new versions to crates.io can involve some complexities. When releasing a new version of a crate, follow these steps:
- Publish the new version to crates.io follow this order:
pilota,pilota-build. - Bump the version. After releasing all the crates, update the
versionfield inCargo.tomlto a new version.