Our goal is to develop Scipian in the open and we want the community to be
involved from day one. However to achieve the goal, we need governance around
introducing "substantial" changes to the platform. The scipian/rfcs repository
is how we organize that process.
The "RFC" (Request for Comments) process is intended to provide a consistent and controlled path for new features to enter the platform. This will allow all stakeholders to be confident about the direction the platform is evolving in.
Many changes however, including bug fixes and documentation improvements can be implemented and reviewed via the normal GitHub pull request workflow. For more information, please reference the CONTRIBUTING document.
- Thanks
- When You Need to Follow This Process
- Before Creating an RFC
- Process
- Life Cycle
- Reviewing
- Implementing
- Holding
- Governance
- License
- Contributions
First, before we begin, this process is heavily inspired by the Rust Community. You are a great example of how a community can operate and thrive. Thank you!
You need to follow this process if you intend to make substantial changes to
the platform or the RFC process itself. The definition of a substantial change
is evolving based on community norms and varies depending on what part of the
ecosystem you are proposing to change.
Here are some examples of when an RFC is required:
- Any semantic change to the platform that is not a bugfix.
- Removing features, including those that are feature-gated.
- Creating roadmaps that encompass where the platform is going.
Here are some examples of when an RFC is not required:
- Rephrasing, reorganizing, refactoring, or otherwise "changing shape does not change meaning".
- Additions that strictly improve the code base like performance/speedup, better error handling, and etc.
- Additions only likely to be noticed by other developers of scipian, invisible to users of scipian.
DISCLAIMER: If you submit a pull request to implement a new feature without going through the RFC process, it may be closed with a polite request to submit an RFC first.
Please do not try to rush the process, there are many reasons it is in place and one major reason is having a well thought out feature that is documented. This will allow implementing the feature much smoother, because you will know what you are building before any work is done.
Rushing the process will definitely hurt it's chances of acceptance. For example RFCs that are hastily proposed, low quality, previously rejected, or those that don't fit into the near-term roadmap, may be quickly rejected which can be demotivating for the unprepared contributor. Laying some groundwork ahead of the RFC can make the process smoother.
There is no single best way to prepare for submitting an RFC, but talking it over with the community in the different channels to determine if the RFC may be desirable is a great way. From there, having a consistent impact on the project requires concerted effort towards consensus-building.
To get a major feature added to Scipian, you must first get the RFC merged into the RFC repository as a markdown file. At that point, the RFC becomes "active" and may be implemented with the goal of eventual inclusion into Scipian.
- Fork the RFC repo.
- Copy the 0000-template.md to text/0000-my-feature.md. (Where my-feature is descriptive. Do not assign an RFC number yet.)
- Fill in the RFC and put care into the details: RFCs that do not present convincing motivation, demonstrate understanding of the impact of the design, or are disingenuous about the drawbacks or alternatives tend to be poorly received.
- Submit a pull request. As a pull request the RFC will receive design feedback from the larger community, and the author should be prepared to revise it in response.
- Each pull request will be triaged by the maintainers.
- Build concensus and integrate feedback. RFCs that have broad support are much more likely to make progress than those that don't receive any comments. Feel free to reach out to the RFC assignee in particular to get help identifying stakeholders and obstacles.
- All conversations should stay within the comment thread of the pull request itself. Offline discussion will be summarized on the pull request comment thread.
- RFCs rarely go through this process unchanged, especially as alternatives and drawbacks are shown. You can make edits, big and small, to the RFC to clarify or change the design, but make changes as new commits to the pull request, and leave a comment on the pull request explaining your changes. Specifically, do not squash or rebase commits after they are visible on the pull request.
- At some point, a maintainer will propose a "motion for final comment period"
(FCP), along with a disposition for the RFC (merge, close, or hold).
- This step is taken when enough of the tradeoffs have been discussed that the subteam is in a position to make a decision. That does not require consensus amongst all participants in the RFC thread (which is usually impossible). However, the argument supporting the disposition on the RFC needs to have already been clearly articulated, and there should not be a strong consensus against that position outside of the maintainers. Maintainers use their best judgment in taking this step, and the FCP itself ensures there is ample time and notification for stakeholders to push back if it is made prematurely.
- For RFCs with lengthy discussion, the motion to FCP is usually preceded by a summary comment trying to lay out the current state of the discussion and major tradeoffs/points of disagreement.
- Before actually entering FCP, all members of the maintainers group must sign off; this is often the point at which many members first review the RFC in full depth.
- Once an FCP is called, it will last ten calendar days, so it is open for at least five business days. We will do our best to advertise widely in our community channels. This way all stakeholders have a chance to lodge any final objections before a decision is reached.
- In most cases, the FCP period is quiet, and the RFC is either merged or closed. However, sometimes substantial new arguments or ideas are raised. When this happens, the RFC is canceled and the it goes back into development mode.
Once an RFC reaches "active" status, an issue will be created in the
scipian/community repository and the label type/epic will be applied. Using
the RFC as reference, the epic can then be broken down into it's stories. Since
we have multiple repositories in the Scipian organization, the stories should be
created in the corresponding repository the story belongs to. When the work has
been broken down, then the author may implement it and follow the pull request
model to the appropriate Scipian repositories. Please refer to
CONTRIBUTING document for further instructions.
Please keep in mind that once an "RFC" becomes "active", it does not mean that it's a rubber stamp and that the work will be merged. However, it does mean that in principle all the major stakeholders have agreed to the feature and are amendable to merging it.
Nor does being "active" imply anything about what priority is assigned to it's implementation. Nor does it imply anything about whether a Scipian 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 also not expect that other project developers will take on responsibility of implementing their accepted feature.
Modifications to "active" RFCs can be done in follow-up pull requests. We strive to write each RFC in a manner that it will reflect the final design of the feature, but 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.
In general, once accepted, RFCs should not be substantially changed. Only very minor changes should be submitted as amendments. More substantial changes should be new RFCs, with a note added to the original RFC. Exactly what counts as a "very minor change" is up to the maintainers to decide.
While the RFC pull request is up, the maintainers may schedule meetings with the author and/or relevant stakeholders to discuss the issues in greater detail. Following the RFC process, a summary from the meetings will be posted back to the RFC pull request.
Maintainers makes final decisions about RFCs after the benefits and drawbacks are well understood. These decisions can be made at any time, but the maintainers will regularly issue decisions. When a decision is made, the RFC pull request will either be merged or closed. In either case, if the reasoning is not clear from the discussion in thread, the maintainers will add a comment describing the rationale for the decision.
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 Scipian Community
repository with the type/epic label applied to it; thus that associated issue
can be assigned a priority via the triage process that the maintainers use for
all issues in the Scipian organization.
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).
Some RFC pull requests are tagged with the inactive/on-hold label when they
are closed (as part of the rejection process). An RFC closed with
inactive/on-hold is marked as such because we want neither to think about
evaluating the proposal nor about implementing the described feature until some
time in the future, and we believe that we can afford to wait until then to do
so. Historically, "on-hold" was used to hold features until after 1.0. Held pull
requests may be re-opened when the time is right. We don't have any formal
process for that, you should ask the maintainers.
Usually an RFC pull request marked as inactive/on-hold has already passed an
informal first round of evaluation, namely the round of "do we think we would
ever possibly consider making this change, as outlined in the RFC pull request,
or some semi-obvious variation of it." (When the answer to the latter question
is "no", then the appropriate response is to close the RFC, not hold it.)
This process is intended to be as lightweight as reasonable for the present circumstances. Per this process, we are trying to let the process be driven by consensus and community norms, not impose more structure than necessary.
This repository is currently licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. Please refer to the LICENSE or the Apache website. The GitHub website "Choose a License" is a great resource too.
Any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, shall be licensed under Apache 2.0, without any additional terms or conditions.