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

• do not push any Merge, Squash & Merge, etc. buttons on the website! The only allowed way of merging is locally, since otherwise merge will not be signed, and websites can fairly well mess things up.

• 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.

Reviews

Currently reviewable.io is being used to review changes that land in qTox.

How to review:

1. Click on the Reviewable button in pull request.
2. Once Reviewable opens, comment on the lines that need changes.
3. Mark as reviewed only those files that don't require any changes – this makes it easier to see which files need to be changed & reviewed again once change is made.
4. If pull request is good to be merged, press LGTM button in Reviewable.
5. Once you're done with evaluating PR, press Publish to make comments visible on GitHub.

Note:

• when no one is assigned to the PR, anyone can review it
• when there are assigned people, only they can mark review as passed

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:#

How to become a maintainer?

Contribute, review & test pull requests, be active, oh and don't forget to mention that you would want to become a maintainer :P

Aside from contents of CONTRIBUTING.md you should also know the contents of this file.

Once you're confident about your knowledge and you've been around the project helping for a while, ask to be added to the qTox organization on GitHub.