Maintainers guide for rclone

Current active maintainers of rclone are

Nick Craig-Wood @ncw
Stefan Breunig @breunigs
Ishuah Kariuki @ishuah
Remus Bunduc @remusb - cache subsystem maintainer
Fabian Möller @B4dM4n

This is a work in progress Draft

This is a guide for how to be an rclone maintainer. This is mostly a writeup of what I (@ncw) attempt to do.

Triaging Tickets

When a ticket comes in it should be triaged. This means it should be classified by adding labels and placed into a milestone. Quite a lot of tickets need a bit of back and forth to determine whether it is a valid ticket so tickets may remain without labels or milestone for a while.

Rclone uses the labels like this:

bug - a definite verified bug
can't reproduce - a problem which we can't reproduce
doc fix - a bug in the documentation - if users need help understanding the docs add this label
duplicate - normally close these and ask the user to subscribe to the original
enhancement: new remote - a new rclone backend
enhancement - a new feature
FUSE - do do with rclone mount command
good first issue - mark these if you find a small self contained issue - these get shown to new visitors to the project
help wanted - mark these if you find a self contained issue - these get shown to new visitors to the project
IMPORTANT - note to maintainers not to forget to fix this for the release
maintenance - internal enhancement, code re-organisation etc
Needs Go 1.XX - waiting for that version of Go to be released
question - not a bug or enhancement - direct to the forum for next time
Remote: XXX - which rclone backend this affects
thinking - not decided on the course of action yet

If it turns out to be a bug or an enhancement it should be tagged as such, with the appropriate other tags. Don't forget the "good first issue" tag to give new contributors something easy to do to get going.

When a ticket is tagged it should be added to a milestone, either the next release, the one after, Soon or Help Wanted. Bugs can be added to the "Known Bugs" milestone if they aren't planned to be fixed or need to wait for something (eg the next go release).

The milestones have these meanings:

v1.XX - stuff we would like to fit into this release
v1.XX+1 - stuff we are leaving until the next release
Soon - stuff we think is a good idea - waiting to be scheduled to a release
Help wanted - blue sky stuff that might get moved up, or someone could help with
Known bugs - bugs waiting on external factors or we aren't going to fix for the moment

Tickets with no milestone are good candidates for ones that have slipped between the gaps and need following up.

Closing Tickets

Close tickets as soon as you can - make sure they are tagged with a release. Post a link to a beta in the ticket with the fix in, asking for feedback.

Pull requests

Try to process pull requests promptly!

Merging pull requests on Github itself works quite well now-a-days so you can squash and rebase or rebase pull requests. rclone doesn't use merge commits. Use the squash and rebase option if you need to edit the commit message.

After merging the commit, in your local master branch, do git pull then run bin/update-authors.py to update the authors file then git push.

Sometimes pull requests need to be left open for a while - this especially true of contributions of new backends which take a long time to get right.

Merges

If you are merging a branch locally then do git merge --ff-only branch-name to avoid a merge commit. You'll need to rebase the branch if it doesn't merge cleanly.

Release cycle

Rclone aims for a 6-8 week release cycle. Sometimes release cycles take longer if there is something big to merge that didn't stabilize properly or for personal reasons.

High impact regressions should be fixed before the next release.

Near the start of the release cycle the dependencies should be updated with make update to give time for bugs to surface.

Towards the end of the release cycle try not to merge anything too big so let things settle down.

Follow the instructions in RELEASE.md for making the release. Note that the testing part is the most time consuming often needing several rounds of test and fix depending on exactly how many new features rclone has gained.

Mailing list

There is now an invite only mailing list for rclone developers rclone-dev on google groups.

TODO

I should probably make a dev@rclone.org to register with cloud providers.

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