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Contributing to Boot

Why, hello! 👋 Thank you for your interest in contributing to Boot.

Before reading, please know that we have a friendly and active community. We're generally happy to answer any questions you might have that aren't served by this document. The best places to find us are:

Thank you in advance for your contribution, and for getting in touch with us if you have any questions or problems!

Table of Contents

General Contribution Guidelines

The Boot maintenance philosophy

We are happy to review and accept contributions of any kind, from anyone, under the provisions of our license, the EPL.

Boot is relatively mature software and a piece of core infrastructure for many organizations. We believe it generally solves the problems we had in mind when we first built it, and hope to efficiently maintain it and to slowly improve it for a very long time. As such, we are careful and deliberate about the contributions we choose to accept.

Contribution guidelines

From our perspective, the best contributions:

  • Are GitHub "issues" filed on the project's Issues page and are labeled, if possible.
  • Clearly state the motivation for the contribution, enumerate its tradeoffs, and provide relevant examples.
  • Refer to any related issues, contributions, or documentation that would help a reviewer further understand the contributor's motivation and the contribution's wider context.
  • Include new tests and documentation, as appropriate.
  • Include an addition to CHANGES.md, as appropriate.
  • Are backwards compatible.

As a mature project that's already met its high level goals, we're most enthusiastic about accepting bug reports, fixes, and improved documentation.

We still welcome new features and general improvements, but the chances they'll be ultimately accepted are lower, especially if they are not backward compatible.

Release schedule and version scheme

Boot has no set release schedule, but we generally release every 6-8 months. We loosely follow semantic versioning with a major.minor.patch semantic to our version numbers. The current major version is 2, and will be for the foreseeable future.

Asking a Question

Currently, the best place to ask a question and receive feedback quickly is in the #boot channel of Clojurians Slack.

An alternative is to create a new issue and label the issue with question.

Reporting a Bug

To report a Boot bug, create a new issue and fill in the provided report template.

Contributing a Bug Fix

A bug fix contribution should contain all of the information that a bug report would contain. In addition, it should follow the General Contribution Guidelines.

Contributing a Feature

Features are things like new tasks, new arguments for existing "builtin" tasks, or anything else that changes or augments the behavior of Boot.

New arguments to builtin tasks

We accept these pretty regularly. They're backward-compatible from a naming perspective because we the Boot maintainers "own" the namespace of argument names. That is, builtin task arguments are not user-extensible, and so can't conflict with users' build.boot files.

However, the number of available argument names for a task is finite, because arguments are limited to the alphabetic short option character, and there are only 25 available: 26 - 1 for h.

The best new task arguments:

  • Don't change the behavior of any existing argument or combination of arguments. That is, if an argument -c is made available, the meaning of -a -b should stay the same. -a -b -c can do something different.
  • Are clearly documented.

New tasks

We're least likely to accept these, because from a naming perspective, they can interfere with names a user creates in boot.user via build.boot. All of the builtin tasks are referred by default into the user's build.boot, and each time we make one, we effectively take away a potentially good name from a user.

Of course, the user can ns-unmap names they don't want to conflict with, but this requires a build.boot or ~/.boot/profile code change on their part. We try very hard to avoid requiring Boot users to change code because of incidental changes.

Your own task library

If you have an idea for a task that you'd like to distribute because you think it would be useful to others, you should first consider making your own library that contains that task. It's best to do this when:

  • The task doesn't need to run inside Boot: it doesn't influence other builtin tasks or leverage Boot's ownership of the filesystem, classpath, and entry point.
  • You want to distribute the task before the next Boot release.

For example, Boot has no built-in new task. Instead, there is a boot/new library that provides one. The new task can be invoked like:

boot -d boot/new new -t app -n my-app

This works because boot/new exports the new task in its ns declaration. The -d option to Boot looks for exported tasks when it loads dependencies, and makes them available at the command line.

If you had idea for a better new task, you could create it, and push it to Clojars yourself. It would then be accessible to Boot users like this:

boot -d YourName/new new -t app -n my-app

This task is also available to users programmatically. They could use your task via:

(set-env! :dependencies '[[YourName/new "1.0.0"]])
(require '[YourName.new :refer [new]]')