How to Contribute to Jaeger

We'd love your help!

Jaeger is Apache 2.0 licensed and accepts contributions via GitHub pull requests. This document outlines some of the conventions on development workflow, commit message formatting, contact points and other resources to make it easier to get your contribution accepted.

We gratefully welcome improvements to documentation as well as to code.

Table of Contents:

Making a Change
License
Certificate of Origin - Sign your work
Branches

Making a Change

Before making any significant changes, please open an issue. Each issue should describe the following:

Requirement - what kind of business use case are you trying to solve?
Problem - what in Jaeger blocks you from solving the requirement?
Proposal - what do you suggest to solve the problem or improve the existing situation?
Any open questions to address

Discussing your proposed changes ahead of time will make the contribution process smooth for everyone. Once the approach is agreed upon, make your changes and open a pull request (PR). Each PR should describe:

Which problem it is solving. Normally it should be simply a reference to the corresponding issue, e.g. Resolves #123.
What changes are made to achieve that.

Your pull request is most likely to be accepted if each commit:

Has a good commit message. In summary:
- Separate subject from body with a blank line
- Limit the subject line to 50 characters
- Capitalize the subject line
- Do not end the subject line with a period
- Use the imperative mood in the subject line
- Wrap the body at 72 characters
- Use the body to explain what and why instead of how
Has been signed by the author (see below).

License

By contributing your code, you agree to license your contribution under the terms of the Apache License.

If you are adding a new file it should have a header like below. In some languages, e.g. Python, you may need to change the comments to start with #. The easiest way is to copy the header from one of the existing source files and make sure the year is current and the copyright says "The Jaeger Authors".

// Copyright (c) 2019 The Jaeger Authors.
//
// Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
// you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
// You may obtain a copy of the License at
//
// http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
//
// Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
// distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
// WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
// See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
// limitations under the License.

Certificate of Origin - Sign your work

By contributing to this project you agree to the Developer Certificate of Origin (or simply DCO). This document was created by the Linux Kernel community and is a simple statement that you, as a contributor, have the legal right to make the contribution.

The sign-off is a simple line at the end of the explanation for the patch, which certifies that you wrote it or otherwise have the right to pass it on as an open-source patch. The rules are pretty simple: if you can certify the conditions in the DCO, then just add a line to every git commit message:

Signed-off-by: Bender Bending Rodriguez <bender.is.great@gmail.com>

using your real name (sorry, no pseudonyms or anonymous contributions.) You can add the sign off when creating the git commit via git commit -s.

If you want signing to be automatic you can set up some aliases:

Missing sign-offs

Note that every commit in the pull request must be signed. Jaeger repositories are configured with a DCO-bot that will check sign-offs on every commit and block the PR from being merged if some commits are missing sign-offs. If you only have one commit or the latest commit in the PR is missing a sign-off, the simplest way to fix this is to run:

git commit --amend -s

which will prompt you to edit the commit message while adding a signature. Simply accept the text as is, and push the branch:

git push --force

If some commit in the middle of your commit history is missing the sign-off, the simplest solution is to squash the commits into one and sign it. For example, suppose that your branch history looks like this:

fe43631 - Fix HotROD Docker command
933efb3 - Add files for ingester
214c133 - Rename gas to gosec
0a40309 - Update Makefile build_ui target to lerna structure
7919cd9 - Add support for Cassandra reconnect interval
a0dc40e - Fix deploy step
77a0573 - (tag: v1.6.0) Prepare release 1.6.0

Let's assume that the first commit 77a0573 was the commit before you started work on your PR, and commits from a0dc40e to fe43631 are your changes that you want to squash. You can run the soft reset command:

git reset --soft 77a0573

It will undo all changes after commit 77a0573 and stage them. You can commit them all at once while adding the signature:

git commit -s -m 'your commit message, e.g. the PR title'

Then push the branch:

git push --force

Branches

Upstream repository should contain only maintenance branches (e.g. release-1.0). For feature branches use forked repository.

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