Contributing

Thank you for considering making contributions to Tendermint and related repositories (Basecoin, Merkleeyes, etc.)!

Please follow standard github best practices: fork the repo, branch from the tip of develop, make some commits, and submit a pull request to develop. See the open issues for things we need help with!

Please make sure to use gofmt before every commit - the easiest way to do this is have your editor run it for you upon saving a file.

Forking

Please note that Go requires code to live under absolute paths, which complicates forking. While my fork lives at https://github.com/ebuchman/tendermint, the code should never exist at $GOPATH/src/github.com/ebuchman/tendermint. Instead, we use git remote to add the fork as a new remote for the original repo, $GOPATH/src/github.com/tendermint/tendermint , and do all the work there.

For instance, to create a fork and work on a branch of it, I would:

Create the fork on github, using the fork button.
Go to the original repo checked out locally (ie. $GOPATH/src/github.com/tendermint/tendermint)
git remote rename origin upstream
git remote add origin git@github.com:ebuchman/basecoin.git

Now origin refers to my fork and upstream refers to the tendermint version. So I can git push -u origin master to update my fork, and make pull requests to tendermint from there. Of course, replace ebuchman with your git handle.

To pull in updates from the origin repo, run

* `git fetch upstream`
* `git rebase upstream/master` (or whatever branch you want)

Please don't make Pull Requests to master.

Dependencies

We use glide to manage dependencies. That said, the master branch of every Tendermint repository should just build with go get, which means they should be kept up-to-date with their dependencies so we can get away with telling people they can just go get our software. Since some dependencies are not under our control, a third party may break our build, in which case we can fall back on glide install. Even for dependencies under our control, glide helps us keeps multiple repos in sync as they evolve. Anything with an executable, such as apps, tools, and the core, should use glide.

Run bash scripts/glide/status.sh to get a list of vendored dependencies that may not be up-to-date.

Testing

All repos should be hooked up to circle. If they have .go files in the root directory, they will be automatically tested by circle using go test -v -race ./.... If not, they will need a circle.yml. Ideally, every repo has a Makefile that defines make test and includes its continuous integration status using a badge in the README.md.

Branching Model and Release

User-facing repos should adhere to the branching model: http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/. That is, these repos should be well versioned, and any merge to master requires a version bump and tagged release.

Libraries need not follow the model strictly, but would be wise to, especially go-p2p and go-rpc, as their versions are referenced in tendermint core.

Development Procedure:

the latest state of development is on develop
develop must never fail make test
no --force onto develop (except when reverting a broken commit, which should seldom happen)
create a development branch either on github.com/tendermint/tendermint, or your fork (using git add origin)
before submitting a pull request, begin git rebase on top of develop

Pull Merge Procedure:

ensure pull branch is rebased on develop
run make test to ensure that all tests pass
merge pull request
the unstable branch may be used to aggregate pull merges before testing once
push master may request that pull requests be rebased on top of unstable

Release Procedure:

start on develop
run integration tests (see test_integrations in Makefile)
prepare changelog/release issue
bump versions
push to release-vX.X.X to run the extended integration tests on the CI
merge to master
merge master back to develop

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