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Maintainer Guidelines

These are guidelines for maintainers of this repository as (mostly) gifted to us by His Beardliness, @jeffbcross. They are words to live by for those that are tasked with reviewing and merging pull requests and otherwise shepherding the community. As the roster of trusted maintainers grows, we'll expect these guidelines to stay pretty much the same (but suggestions are always welcome).

The 10 6 Commandments

  • Code of Conduct. We should be setting a good example and be welcoming to all. We should be listening to all feedback from everyone in our community and respect their viewpoints and opinions.
  • Be sure PRs meet Contribution Guidelines. It's important we keep our code base and repository consistent. The best way to do this is to know and enforce the contribution guidelines.
  • Clean, flat commit history. We never click the green merge button on PRs, but instead we pull down the PR branch and rebase it against master then replace master with the PR branch. See example gist. This reduces noise in the commit history, removing all of the merge commits, and keeps history flat. The flat history is beneficial to tools/scripts that analyze commit ancestry.
  • Always green master. Failing master builds tend to cascade into other broken builds, and frustration among other contributors who have rebased against a broken master. Much of our deployment and other infrastructure is based on the assumption that master is always green, nothing should be merged before Travis has confirmed that a PR is green, even for seemingly insignificant changes. Nothing should be merged into a red master, and whomever broke it should drop everything and fix it right away. Fixes should be submitted as a PR and verified as green instead of immediately merging to master.
  • No force pushes to master. Only in rare circumstances should a force push to master be made, and other maintainers should be notified beforehand. The most common situation for a justified force push is when a commit has been pushed with an invalid message. The force push should be made as soon as possible to reduce side effects.
  • Small, logical commits. A PR should be focused on a single problem, though that problem may be reasonable to be broken into a few logical commits. For example, a global renaming may be best to be broken into a single commit that renames all files, and then a commit that renames symbols within files. This makes the review process simpler easier, so the diff of the meaty commit (where symbols are renamed) can be easily understood than if both were done in the same commit, in which case github would just show a deleted file and an added file.