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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.

First, in terms of structure, there is no particular concept of "Bitcoin Core developers" in the sense of privileged people. Open source often naturally revolves around a meritocracy where contributors earn trust from the developer community over time. Nevertheless, 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 as well as overall merging, moderation and appointment of maintainers.

Communication Channels

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

Discussion about codebase improvements happens in GitHub issues and pull requests.

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" (PRs). 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

For GUI-related issues or pull requests, the https://github.com/bitcoin-core/gui repository should be used. For all other issues and pull requests, the https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin node repository should be used.

The master branch for all monotree repositories is identical.

As a rule of thumb, everything that only modifies src/qt is a GUI-only pull request. However:

  • For global refactoring or other transversal changes the node repository should be used.
  • For GUI-related build system changes, the node repository should be used because the change needs review by the build systems reviewers.
  • Changes in src/interfaces need to go to the node repository because they might affect other components like the wallet.

For large GUI changes that include build system and interface changes, it is recommended to first open a pull request against the GUI repository. When there is agreement to proceed with the changes, a pull request with the build system and interfaces changes can be submitted to the node repository.

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

Committing Patches

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.

Make sure each individual commit is hygienic: that it builds successfully on its own without warnings, errors, regressions, or test failures.

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 "Correct 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 (usernames prefixed with "@").

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

  • Push changes to your fork
  • Create pull request

Creating the Pull Request

The title of the pull request should be prefixed by the component or area that the pull request affects. Valid areas as:

  • consensus for changes to consensus critical code
  • doc for changes to the documentation
  • qt or gui for changes to bitcoin-qt
  • log for changes to log messages
  • mining for changes to the mining code
  • net or p2p for changes to the peer-to-peer network code
  • refactor for structural changes that do not change behavior
  • rpc, rest or zmq for changes to the RPC, REST or ZMQ APIs
  • script for changes to the scripts and tools
  • test, qa or ci for changes to the unit tests, QA tests or CI code
  • util or lib for changes to the utils or libraries
  • wallet for changes to the wallet code
  • build for changes to the GNU Autotools or reproducible builds

Examples:

consensus: Add new opcode for BIP-XXXX OP_CHECKAWESOMESIG
net: Automatically create onion service, listen on Tor
qt: Add feed bump button
log: Fix typo in log message

The body of the pull request should contain sufficient description of what the patch does, and even more importantly, why, with justification and reasoning. You should include references to any discussions (for example, other issues or mailing list discussions).

The description for a new pull request should not contain any @ mentions. The PR description will be included in the commit message when the PR is merged and any users mentioned in the description will be annoyingly notified each time a fork of Bitcoin Core copies the merge. Instead, make any username mentions in a subsequent comment to the PR.

Translation changes

Note that translations should not be submitted as pull requests. Please see Translation Process for more information on helping with translations.

Work in Progress Changes and Requests for Comments

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.

Address Feedback

At this stage, one should expect comments and review from other contributors. You can add more commits to your pull request by committing them locally and pushing to your fork.

You are expected to reply to any review comments before your pull request is merged. You may update the code or reject the feedback if you do not agree with it, but you should express so in a reply. If there is outstanding feedback and you are not actively working on it, your pull request may be closed.

Please refer to the peer review section below for more details.

Squashing Commits

If your pull request contains fixup commits (commits that change the same line of code repeatedly) or too fine-grained commits, you may be asked to squash your commits before it will be reviewed. 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 not just listing the interim commits.

If you have problems with squashing or other git workflows, you can enable "Allow edits from maintainers" in the right-hand sidebar of the GitHub web interface 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.