Contributing to Coffee

Table of Content

  • Introduction
  • Code Style
  • Commit Style
  • How to make the release

Introduction

Welcome to the HACKING guide and let's peek into how a day in the life of a Coffee plugin manager maintainer looks like.

After reading this, you should be prepared to contribute to the repository and be a potential maintainer in the future if you desire!

Before starting developing you can with make setup to configure all the necessary check before create a commit.

Code style

To ensure consistency throughout the source code, these rules are to be kept in mind:

  • All features or bug fixes must be tested by one or more specs (unit-tests).
  • All public API methods must be documented. (Details TBC).
  • Four spaces
  • Call make fmt before committing
  • If you can, GPG-sign at least your top commit when filing a PR

If You Don’t Know The Right Thing, Do The Simplest Thing

Sometimes the right way is unclear, so it’s best not to spend time on it. It’s far easier to rewrite simple code than complex code, too.

Use of FIXME

There are two cases in which you should use a /* FIXME: */ comment: one is where an optimization seems possible, but it’s unclear if it’s yet worthwhile, and the second one is in the case of an ugly corner case which could be improved (and may be in a following patch).

There are always compromises in code: eventually, it needs to ship. FIXME is grep-fodder for yourself and others, as well as useful warning signs if we later encounter an issue in some part of the code.

Write For Today: Unused Code Is Buggy Code

Don’t overdesign: complexity is a killer. If you need a fancy data structure, start with a brute force linked list. Once that’s working, perhaps consider your fancy structure, but don’t implement a generic thing. Use /* FIXME: ...*/ to salve your conscience.

Keep Your Patches Reviewable

Try to make a single change at a time. It’s tempting to do “drive-by” fixes as you see other things, and a minimal amount is unavoidable, but you can end up shaving infinite yaks. This is a good time to drop a /* FIXME: ...*/ comment and move on.

Commit Style

The commit style is one of the more important concepts when managing a monorepo like Coffee, and in particular, the commit style is used to generate the changelog for the next release.

Each commit message consists of a header, a body and a footer. The header has a special format that includes a type, a scope and a subject:

<type>(<scope>): <subject>
<BLANK LINE>
<body>
<BLANK LINE>
<footer>

The header is mandatory while the scope of the header is optional.

All lines in a commit message should be at most 100 characters! This ensures better readability on GitHub as well as in various git tools.

The footer should contain a closing reference to an issue if any.

Some couple of examples are:

docs(changelog): update changelog to beta.5

fix(release): need to depend on the latest rxjs and zone.js

The version in our package.json gets copied to the one we publish, and users need the latest of these.

Types

  • feat: A new feature
  • fix: A bug fix
  • deprecate: Deprecate a feature and start to the removing process (3 official release or 1 major release)
  • remove: End of life for the feature.

Scopes

  • core: Changes related to the main functions
  • cmd: Changes related to the cli package
  • docs: Changes related to the documentation of the crate
  • github: Changes related to the github interface
  • lib: Changes related to the core library package
  • storage: Changes related to the storage package

Subject

The subject contains a succinct description of the change:

  • use the imperative, present tense: "change" not "changed" nor "changes"
  • don't capitalize the first letter
  • no dot (.) at the end

Body

You are free to put all the content you want inside the body, but if you are fixing try to follow this indication and do not waste the body space, also it is preferable that if you fix an exception or some wrong behavior you must put the details or stacktrace inside the body ensure sure that the search engine indexes it.

An example of commit body is the following one

checker: fixes overloading operation when the type is optimized

The stacktrace is the following one

} expected `Foo` not `Foo` - both operands must be the same type for operator overloading
   11 | }
   12 |
   13 | fn (_ Foo) == (_ Foo) bool {
      |                  ~~~
   14 |     return true
   15 | }---
description: "`Rust core lightning Rust framework` HACKING guide"
---

How to make the release

TODO

N.B: Part of this document is stolen from core lightning docs made with from @rustyrussell 's experience.

Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute. - Someone

Cheers!

Vincent