100 lines
4.0 KiB
Markdown
100 lines
4.0 KiB
Markdown
# The libcontainer Maintainers' Guide
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## Introduction
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Dear maintainer. Thank you for investing the time and energy to help
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make libcontainer as useful as possible. Maintaining a project is difficult,
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sometimes unrewarding work. Sure, you will get to contribute cool
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features to the project. But most of your time will be spent reviewing,
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cleaning up, documenting, answering questions, justifying design
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decisions - while everyone has all the fun! But remember - the quality
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of the maintainers work is what distinguishes the good projects from the
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great. So please be proud of your work, even the unglamourous parts,
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and encourage a culture of appreciation and respect for *every* aspect
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of improving the project - not just the hot new features.
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This document is a manual for maintainers old and new. It explains what
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is expected of maintainers, how they should work, and what tools are
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available to them.
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This is a living document - if you see something out of date or missing,
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speak up!
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## What are a maintainer's responsibility?
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It is every maintainer's responsibility to:
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* 1) Expose a clear roadmap for improving their component.
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* 2) Deliver prompt feedback and decisions on pull requests.
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* 3) Be available to anyone with questions, bug reports, criticism etc.
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on their component. This includes IRC, GitHub requests and the mailing
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list.
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* 4) Make sure their component respects the philosophy, design and
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roadmap of the project.
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## How are decisions made?
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Short answer: with pull requests to the libcontainer repository.
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libcontainer is an open-source project with an open design philosophy. This
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means that the repository is the source of truth for EVERY aspect of the
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project, including its philosophy, design, roadmap and APIs. *If it's
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part of the project, it's in the repo. It's in the repo, it's part of
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the project.*
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As a result, all decisions can be expressed as changes to the
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repository. An implementation change is a change to the source code. An
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API change is a change to the API specification. A philosophy change is
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a change to the philosophy manifesto. And so on.
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All decisions affecting libcontainer, big and small, follow the same 3 steps:
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* Step 1: Open a pull request. Anyone can do this.
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* Step 2: Discuss the pull request. Anyone can do this.
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* Step 3: Accept (`LGTM`) or refuse a pull request. The relevant maintainers do
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this (see below "Who decides what?")
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## Who decides what?
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All decisions are pull requests, and the relevant maintainers make
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decisions by accepting or refusing the pull request. Review and acceptance
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by anyone is denoted by adding a comment in the pull request: `LGTM`.
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However, only currently listed `MAINTAINERS` are counted towards the required
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two LGTMs.
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libcontainer follows the timeless, highly efficient and totally unfair system
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known as [Benevolent dictator for life](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_Dictator_for_Life), with Michael Crosby in the role of BDFL.
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This means that all decisions are made by default by Michael. Since making
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every decision himself would be highly un-scalable, in practice decisions
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are spread across multiple maintainers.
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The relevant maintainers for a pull request can be worked out in two steps:
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* Step 1: Determine the subdirectories affected by the pull request. This
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might be `netlink/` and `security/`, or any other part of the repo.
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* Step 2: Find the `MAINTAINERS` file which affects this directory. If the
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directory itself does not have a `MAINTAINERS` file, work your way up
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the repo hierarchy until you find one.
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### I'm a maintainer, and I'm going on holiday
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Please let your co-maintainers and other contributors know by raising a pull
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request that comments out your `MAINTAINERS` file entry using a `#`.
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### I'm a maintainer, should I make pull requests too?
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Yes. Nobody should ever push to master directly. All changes should be
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made through a pull request.
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### Who assigns maintainers?
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Michael has final `LGTM` approval for all pull requests to `MAINTAINERS` files.
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### How is this process changed?
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Just like everything else: by making a pull request :)
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