The LNP/BP project operates an open contributor model where anyone is welcome to contribute towards development in the form of peer review, documentation, testing and patches.
Anyone is invited to contribute without regard to technical experience, "expertise", OSS experience, age, or other concern. However, the development of standards & reference implementations demands a high-level of rigor, adversarial thinking, thorough testing and risk-minimization. Any bug may cost users real money. That being said, we deeply welcome people contributing for the first time to an open source project or pick up Rust while contributing. Don't be shy, you'll learn.
Communication about LNP/BP standards & implementations happens primarily in #lnp-pb IRC chat on Freenode with the logs available at http://gnusha.org/lnp-bp/
Discussion about code base improvements happens in GitHub issues and on pull requests.
Major projects are tracked here. Major milestones are tracked here.
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 a as follows:
- Fork Repository
- Create topic branch
- Commit 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. Further, each commit, individually, should compile and pass tests, in order to ensure git bisect and other automated tools function properly.
When adding a new feature thought must be given to the long term technical debt. Every new features should be covered by unit tests.
When refactoring, structure your PR to make it easy to review and don't hesitate to split it into multiple small, focused PRs.
The Minimal Supported Rust Version is nightly for the period of active development; it is enforced by our Travis. Later we plan to fix to some specific Rust version after the initial library release.
Commits should cover both the issue fixed and the solution's rationale. These guidelines should be kept in mind.
To facilitate communication with other contributors, the project is making use of GitHub's "assignee" field. First check that no one is assigned and then comment suggesting that you're working on it. If someone is already assigned, don't hesitate to ask if the assigned party or previous commenters are still working on it if it has been awhile.
The main library development happens in the master branch. This branch must
always compile without errors (using Travis CI). All external contributions are
made within PRs into this branch.
Each commitment within a PR to the master must
- compile without errors;
- contain all necessary tests for the introduced functional;
- contain all docs.
Additionally to the master branch the repository has develop branch for any
experimental developments. This branch may not compile and should not be used by
any projects depending on lnpbp library.
Anyone may participate in peer review which is expressed by comments in the pull request. Typically reviewers will review the code for obvious errors, as well as test out the patch set and opine on the technical merits of the patch. PR should be reviewed first on the conceptual level before focusing on code style or grammar fixes.
Rust-fmt should be used as a coding style recommendations in general, with a
default coding style. By default, Rustfmt uses a style which conforms to the
[Rust style guide][style guide] that has been formalized through the [style RFC
process][fmt rfcs]. It is also required to run cargo fmt to make the code
formatted according to rustfmt parameters
Security is the primary focus of Rust-LNPBP; disclosure of security vulnerabilities helps prevent user loss of funds. If you believe a vulnerability may affect other implementations, please inform them.
Note that Rust-LNPBP is currently considered "pre-production" during this time, there is no special handling of security issues. Please simply open an issue on Github.
Related to the security aspect, Rust-LNPBP developers take testing very seriously. Due to the modular nature of the project, writing new functional tests is easy and good test coverage of the codebase is an important goal. Refactoring the project to enable fine-grained unit testing is also an ongoing effort.
Fuzzing is heavily encouraged: feel free to add related material under fuzz/
Mutation testing is planned; any contribution there would be warmly welcomed.
You may be interested by Jon Atack guide on How to review Bitcoin Core PRs and How to make Bitcoin Core PRs. While there are differences between the projects in terms of context and maturity, many of the suggestions offered apply to this project.
Overall, have fun :)