This process attempts to emulate the success of the Rust programming language and as such has almost mirrored the RFC process the Rust developers use, which is tried and tested and appears to work very well.
Many changes, including bug fixes and documentation improvements can be implemented and reviewed via the normal GitHub pull request workflow.
Some changes though are "substantial", and we ask that these be put through a bit of a design process and produce a consensus among the community and the core team.
The "RFC" (request for comments) process is intended to provide a consistent and controlled path for new features to enter the network and core libraries, so that all stakeholders can be confident about the direction in which the network is evolving.
- Before creating an RFC
- The role of the shepherd
- The RFC life-cycle
- Reviewing RFCs
- Implementing an RFC
- Help! This is all too informal
A hastily proposed RFC can hurt its chances of acceptance. Low quality proposals, proposals for previously rejected features, may be quickly rejected, which can be demotivating for the unprepared contributor. Laying some groundwork ahead of the RFC can make the process smoother.
Although there is no single way to prepare for submitting an RFC, it is generally a good idea to pursue feedback from other project developers beforehand to ascertain that the RFC may be desirable. Having a consistent impact on the project requires concerted effort toward consensus-building.
The most common preparations for writing and submitting an RFC include filing and discussing ideas on the RFC issue tracker, and occasionally posting "pre-RFCs" on the Peercointalk Forum for early review.
As a rule of thumb, receiving encouraging feedback from long-standing project developers, and particularly members of the core team or existing contributors, is a good indication that the RFC is worth pursuing.
During triage, every RFC will either be closed or assigned a shepherd. The role of the shepherd is to move the RFC through the process. This starts with simply reading the RFC in detail and providing initial feedback. The shepherd should also solicit feedback from people who are likely to have strong opinions about the RFC. Finally, when this feedback has been incorporated and the RFC seems to be in a steady state, the shepherd will bring it to the meeting. In general, the idea here is to "front-load" as much of the feedback as possible before the point where we actually reach a decision.
Once an RFC becomes active then authors may implement it and submit the feature as a pull request to the repo. Being "active" is not a rubber stamp and in particular still does not mean the feature will ultimately be merged. It does mean that in principle all the major stakeholders have agreed to the feature and are amenable to merging it.
Furthermore, the fact that a given RFC has been accepted and is "active" implies nothing about what priority is assigned to its implementation, nor does it imply anything about whether a developer has been assigned the task of implementing the feature. While it is not necessary that the author of the RFC also write the implementation, it is by far the most effective way to see an RFC through to completion. Authors should not expect that other project developers will take on responsibility for implementing their accepted feature.
Modifications to active RFCs can be done in follow up PRs. We strive to write each RFC in a manner that it will reflect the final design of the feature, however, the nature of the process means that we cannot expect every merged RFC to actually reflect what the end result will be at the time of the next major release. We therefore try to keep each RFC document somewhat in sync with the network feature as planned, tracking such changes via followup pull requests to the document.
An RFC that makes it through the entire process to implementation is considered "implemented" and is moved to the "implemented" folder. An RFC that fails after becoming active is "rejected" and moves to the "rejected" folder.
While the RFC PR is up, the shepherd may schedule meetings with the author and/or relevant stakeholders to discuss the issues in greater detail. In some cases the topic may be discussed at the larger [weekly meeting]. In either situation, a summary from the meeting will be posted back to the RFC pull request.
The PeerAssets team and active contributors make final decisions about RFCs after the benefits and drawbacks are well understood. These decisions can be made at any time, but the core team will regularly issue decisions on at least a weekly basis. When a decision is made, the RFC PR will either be merged or closed, in either case with a comment describing the rationale for the decision. The comment should largely be a summary of discussion already on the comment thread.
Some accepted RFCs represent vital features that need to be implemented right away. Other accepted RFCs can represent features that can wait until some arbitrary developer feels like doing the work. Every accepted RFC has an associated issue tracking its implementation in the affected repositories. Therefore, the associated issue can be assigned a priority via the triage process that the team uses for all issues in the appropriate repositories.
The author of an RFC is not obligated to implement it. Of course, the RFC author (like any other developer) is welcome to post an implementation for review after the RFC has been accepted.
If you are interested in working on the implementation for an "active" RFC, but cannot determine if someone else is already working on it, feel free to ask (e.g. by leaving a comment on the associated issue). Any issues assigned to a sprint will be clearly marked as such in the library issue tracker.
The process is intended to be as lightweight as reasonable for the present circumstances. As usual, we are trying to let the process be driven by consensus and community norms, not impose more structure than necessary.