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CONTRIBUTING.md

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Contributing to Vertcoin Core

The Vertcoin Core project operates an open contributor model where anyone is welcome to contribute towards development in the form of peer review, testing and patches. This document explains the practical process and guidelines for contributing.

Firstly in terms of structure, there is no particular concept of "Core developers" in the sense of privileged people. Open source often naturally revolves around meritocracy where longer term contributors gain more trust from the developer community. However, some hierarchy is necessary for practical purposes. As such there are repository "maintainers" who are responsible for merging pull requests as well as a "lead maintainer" who is responsible for the release cycle, overall merging, moderation and appointment of maintainers.

Communication Channels

Most communication about Vertcoin Core development happens onthe #development channel on Discord.

Issues List

Open issues can be found on github in the issues list.

Contributor Workflow

The codebase is maintained using the "contributor workflow" where everyone without exception contributes patch proposals using "pull requests". This facilitates social contribution, easy testing and peer review.

To contribute a patch, the workflow is as follows:

  1. Fork repository (only for the first time)
  2. Create topic branch
  3. Commit patches

The project coding conventions in the developer notes must be followed.

In general, commits should be atomic and diffs should be easy to read. For this reason, do not mix any formatting fixes or code moves with actual code changes.

Commit messages should be verbose by default consisting of a short subject line (50 chars max), a blank line and detailed explanatory text as separate paragraph(s), unless the title alone is self-explanatory (like "Corrected typo in init.cpp") in which case a single title line is sufficient. Commit messages should be helpful to people reading your code in the future, so explain the reasoning for your decisions. Further explanation here.

If a particular commit references another issue, please add the reference. For example: refs #1234 or fixes #4321. Using the fixes or closes keywords will cause the corresponding issue to be closed when the pull request is merged.

Commit messages should never contain any @ mentions.

Please refer to the Git manual for more information about Git.

  • Push changes to your fork
  • Create pull request

If a pull request is not to be considered for merging (yet), please prefix the title with [WIP] or use Tasks Lists in the body of the pull request to indicate tasks are pending.

The body of the pull request should contain enough description about what the patch does together with any justification/reasoning. You should include references to any discussions (for example other tickets or mailing list discussions).

Squashing Commits

If your pull request is accepted for merging, you may be asked by a maintainer to squash and or rebase your commits before it will be merged. The basic squashing workflow is shown below.

git checkout your_branch_name
git rebase -i HEAD~n
# n is normally the number of commits in the pull request.
# Set commits (except the one in the first line) from 'pick' to 'squash', save and quit.
# On the next screen, edit/refine commit messages.
# Save and quit.
git push -f # (force push to GitHub)

Please update the resulting commit message if needed. It should read as a coherent message. In most cases, this means that you should not just list the interim commits.

If you have problems with squashing (or other workflows with git), you can alternatively enable "Allow edits from maintainers" in the right GitHub sidebar and ask for help in the pull request.

Please refrain from creating several pull requests for the same change. Use the pull request that is already open (or was created earlier) to amend changes. This preserves the discussion and review that happened earlier for the respective change set.

The length of time required for peer review is unpredictable and will vary from pull request to pull request.

Release Policy

The project leader is the release manager for each Vertcoin Core release.

Copyright

By contributing to this repository, you agree to license your work under the MIT license unless specified otherwise in contrib/debian/copyright or at the top of the file itself. Any work contributed where you are not the original author must contain its license header with the original author(s) and source.