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CONTRIBUTING.md

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Contributing Guidelines

Please follow these steps when making pull requests (PRs):

  1. First, create an issue describing the problem that needs to be fixed. If an issue already exists, skip this step. If you are looking for an issue to fix, see the "good first issue" label.

  2. Assign the issue to yourself and add appropriate labels. If you are an external contributor, comment on the issue so one of the ILLIXR team members can assign the issue to you.

  3. Before you start making changes, make a new branch. The branch MUST be named issue-<issue number>-<some descriptive name>. For instance, issue-32-fix-mem-leak addresses the memory leak described in Issue #32.

  4. Fix the issue.

  5. Add your name to ILLIXR/CONTRIBUTORS.

  6. Push commits up to GitHub.

  7. Open a PR, and link it to the issue that the PR aims to resolve. Please give the PR a descriptive name.

  8. As you make progress on your PR, keep your branch up-to-date with the master branch which may have been updated after starting your PR. Your PR MUST be updated to reflect changes to master in order to be merged. Use the following procedure for updating your branch and when you are ready to commit your changes:

    ## While on your PR branch <issue-branch> hosted at <your-remote> repository:
git commit # or git stash                                               ## Line A
git checkout master

git pull <illixr-remote> master --rebase && git fetch <illixr-remote>   ## Line B

git checkout <issue-branch>
git rebase master                                                       ## Line C

## If you stashed your changes on 'Line A':
git stash apply <stash-number> && git commit

git push <your-remote> <issue-branch> --force-with-lease                ## Line D

    For ILLIXR team members (others jump here):

    • In the example above, <illixr-remote> and <your-remote> are the same.

    • When collaborating on branches in our repository, Line B may pull in changes that overwrite the git commit history when performing Line C. Subsequently, performing Line D will rewrite the history in the public branch. To preserve branch commit histories in the case that a rollback is needed, we will employ a checkpointing process for force updated branches. This process will be manually performed, but may be automated in the future.

      If Line B shows an update to master, the following example illustrates your local repository just after performing Line B:

      A -- B -- C -- P -- Q -- R                                          ## master
           \
            D -- E -- F                                             ## issue-123-fixing-bug

      In this example, commits P, Q, and R have been merged to master (from feature branches not shown) after feature branch issue-123-fixing-bug was forked from master.

      To checkpoint the issue-123-fixing-bug branch while it is checked out:

      git branch issue-123.0-fixing-bug                                   ## Make alias for old issue-123-fixing-bug
git checkout -b issue-123.1-fixing-bug                              ## Make new branch to rebase with master
git rebase master                                                   ## Replay issue-123-fixing-bug onto master
git branch -D issue-123-fixing-bug                                  ## Remove old issue-123-fixing-bug
git branch issue-123-fixing-bug                                     ## Make issue-123-fixing-bug an alias of new branch
git push <illixr-remote> issue-123.{0,1}-fixing-bug                 ## Push new checkpointed branches to remote
git push <illixr-remote> issue-123-fixing-bug --force-with-lease    ## Force update issue-123-fixing-bug

      Note: The term alias here is used to refer to branches which point to the same commit. This usage is different from standard Git Aliases used for git command shortcuts.

      After checkpointing, your local repository should look as follows:

                                 D' -- E' -- F'                           ## issue-123.1-fixing-bug, issue-123-fixing-bug
                          /
A -- B -- C -- P -- Q -- R                                          ## master
           \
            D -- E -- F                                             ## issue-123.0-fixing-bug

      Commits D, E, and F have been added to a new branch starting from R, but now have been given new hashes. This new branch is our up-to-date copy of the feature branch issue-123-fixing-bug.

      While working on a checkpointed branch, keep aliases up-to-date using git rebase:

      git commit                                                          ## Add changes to issue-123.1-fixing-bug
git checkout issue-123-fixing-bug                                   ## Switch to main issue-123-fixing-bug branch
git rebase issue-123.1-fixing-bug                                   ## Fast-forward issue-123-fixing-bug to issue-123.1-fixing-bug

      Conflicts are possible when two or more collaborators push changes concurrently to the same branch. As long as each collaborator ensures that the branch update process starts at Line A, conflicts can be detected and handled locally. In other words, every call to git-push should be preceeded by a call to git-pull, following the process from Line A to Line D (or equivalent; git's CLI allows many ways to achieve the same results).

      Note: Line B rebases the master branch assuming that we have checked out master. Forgetting to specify master in Line B may result in a lossy forced update in the example below. Forgetting to checkout master will immediately apply your checked out feature branch's changes, possibly also resulting in a lossy forced update.

      The output of Line B for a collaborator after the checkpointing process may contain something like this:

      From github.com:ILLIXR/ILLIXR
  A..R          master                  -> <illixr-remote>/master
+ A..F'         issue-123-fixing-bug    -> <illixr-remote>/issue-123-fixing-bug  (forced update)
* [new branch]  issue-123.0-fixing-bug  -> <illixr-remote>/issue-123.0-fixing-bug
* [new branch]  issue-123.1-fixing-bug  -> <illixr-remote>/issue-123.1-fixing-bug

      Conflicts which do not involve updates to the master branch can be resolved simply by rebasing the current feature branch with the updated feature branch, applying new changes on top of the updated feature branch:

      ## For the latest checkpoint X (local) and Y (remote), let Z := Y + 1 in
git checkout issue-123.X-fixing-bug -b issue-123.Z-fixing-bug       ## Make new branch issue-123.Z-fixing-bug
git rebase <illixr-remote>/issue-123.Y-fixing-bug                   ## Replay updates from issue-123.X-fixing-bug
git push <illixr-remote> issue-123.Z-fixing-bug                     ## Make sure to update issue-123-fixing-bug after

      The --force-with-lease argument in Line D is not required for our new checkpoint branch, since a new branch should not conflict with a non-existing remote branch. We expect the subversion number for a new branch resulting from our checkpoint conflict resolution to be new and unique. If the push fails, another conflict has occurred, and checkpoint conflict resolution should be repeated. Line D should be safe to perform for the main feature branch now that we have replayed our commits on top of the updated feature branch.

      Note: In the above example, the git-rebase is performed using the remote copy of the checkpointed branch. We do this because Line B will not fast-forward or force update our local branches (with the same subversion number as a conflicting remote branch, if any).

      In the case of a conflict with updates to master, Line A should show updates to both the master branch and the feature branch to be pushed in Line D. A checkpointed version of the feature branch may also appear. This is because a feature branch should only be checkpointed in the presence of a change to the master branch. Forced pushes should generally not be used for any other purpose. If multiple updates to master and the feature branch have occured, additional checkpointed versions of the feature branch may also appear. In this scenario, we need to rebase our latest version of the feature branch with the latest version of the feature branch pulled from <illixr-remote>.

Philosophy

Why are the above steps necessary?

  1. Assigning the issue to yourself ensures that multiple people don't work on the same thing in parallel.

  2. The branch naming scheme organizes things a bit for us, and also makes it easy to find branches.

  3. Linking the issue to the PR ensures that we know which issue is being resolved, and also automatically closes the issue when the PR gets merged.

  4. Using rebases keeps the master and feature branch histories streamlined (minimizing branching), thus making it easier to compose feature branches for integration testing. See this article on rebasing public branches for more information.

If your PR has not seen activity from the ILLIXR team after a long period of time (e.g., 2 weeks), feel free to contact the team directly on the GitHub Issue Conversation tab or at the Gitter forum linked below.

Other Procedures

  1. Branch Management:

    The branch rebasing and checkpointing process detailed above is tedious, and may be automated in the future. Check back in with this document occasionally for improvements to the branch management process.

  2. Code Formatting:

    As ILLIXR grows, contributions will need to be standardized to accomodate multiple collaborators with different coding styles. During code review of a PR, you may be asked to reformat your code to match the standards set for ILLIXR code base. This process may be manually triggered by a comment from a review, or automated via Git and GitHub in the future.

  3. Issue Templates:

    To make collaboration easier, templates for Issues and Pull Requests will be added to the GitHub web interface. If an appropriate template exists for your task, please ensure to select it before submitting.

Getting Help

You can get seek help from our development community in three places:

  1. Main documentation site

  2. API documentation site

  3. Gitter community forum