qTox/MAINTAINING.md

Guidelines, overview of maintenance process, etc.

“Thou shall GPG-sign.”

Git config

GPG signing

While contributors are suggested to use GPG, as a maintainer you are required to use GPG to sign commits & merges.

If you don't have GPG signing set up yet, now is the moment to do it.

Config, etc.

SSH

Preferably use SSH.

There are quite a few articles about that: https://help.github.com/categories/ssh/

Useful aliases

Check whether commits are GPG-signed with git logs

git config --global alias.logs 'log --show-signature'

Commits

• always use commit message format

• always GPG-sign your commits.

• it's preferable to make a PR with changes that you're about to commit.

  Yes, there might be a situation where something has to be fixed "right now" on master..

  Perhaps a security fix, who knows what future holds. If it's not that important, you're still better off making a PR. Even when you'll just fast-forward commits from PR onto the master branch.

  Reasoning for it is that it's always hard to catch bugs/mistakes that you create, while someone else who just briefly looked at the changeset possibly can see a problem :)

Pull requests

• always test PR that is being merged.

• always GPG-sign PR that you're merging.

• use merge-pr.sh script to merge PRs, e.g. ./merge-pr.sh 1234.

  You don't have to use it, but then you're running into risk of breaking travis build of master & other PRs, since it verifies all commit messages, indlucing merge messages.

  Risk, that can be avoided when one doesn't type manually merge message 😉

• might want to use test-pr.sh.

  Commits that are about to be merged don't have to be signed, but merge-commit must be signed. To simplify process, and ensure that things are done "right", it's preferable to use merge-pr.sh script, which does that for you automatically.

• give a PR some "breathing space" right after it's created – i.e. merging something right away can lead to bugs & regressions suddenly popping up, thus it's preferable to wait at least a day or so, to let people test & comment on the PR before merging.

  • with trivial changes, like fixing typos or something along those lines, feel free to merge right away.

• if you're about to merge PR, assign yourself to it.

• if you decide that PR actually isn't to be (yet) merged, de-assign yourself.

• if PR requires some changes, comment what parts need to be adjusted, and assign the PR-needs-changes label – after requested changes are done, remove the label.

• if PR doesn't apply properly on top of current master (when using merge-pr.sh script), request a rebase and tag PR with PR-needs-rebase.

Issues

• tag issues
  • help wanted tag should be used whenever no one is currently working on the issue, and you're not going to work on it in foreseeable future (hours, day or two).
  • when you request more info to be provided in the issue, tag it with I-need-info. Remove tag once needed info has been provided.
    • sometimes there are issue with only one comment, and no reply to query for more info. Those issues usually can be closed after some period, preferably after a month or more with no reply. To search for them, you can specify time period when issue with a given tag was last updated, e.g.: label:I-need-info updated:<2016-03-01.
• if you're going to fix the issue, assign yourself to it.
• when closing an issue, preferably state the reason why it was closed, unless it was closed automatically by commit message.
• when issue is a duplicate, tag it with duplicate, and issue that it was a duplicate of, tag with higher duplicates:#