Many changes, including bug fixes and documentation improvements can be implemented and reviewed via the normal GitLab merge 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 Redox community.
The "RFC" (request for comments) process is intended to provide a consistent and controlled path for new features to enter, so that all stakeholders can be confident about the direction the OS is evolving in.
You need to follow this process if you intend to make "substantial" changes to Redox, Cargo, Crates.io, or the RFC process itself. What constitutes a "substantial" change is evolving based on community norms and varies depending on what part of the ecosystem you are proposing to change.
Some changes do not require an RFC:
- Rephrasing, reorganizing, refactoring, or otherwise "changing shape does not change meaning".
- Additions that strictly improve objective, numerical quality criteria (warning removal, speedup, better software compatibility, more parallelism, trap more errors, etc.) invisible to users-of-redox.
If you submit a merge 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.
A hastily-proposed RFC can hurt its chances of acceptance. Low quality proposals, proposals for previously-rejected features, 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.
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.
As a rule of thumb, receiving encouraging feedback from long-standing project developers, is a good indication that the RFC is worth pursuing.
In short, to get a major feature added to Redox, one must first get the RFC merged into the RFC repo as a markdown file. At that point the RFC is 'active' and may be implemented with the goal of eventual inclusion into Redox.
- Fork the RFC repo http://gitlab.redox-os.org/redox-os/rfcs
- Copy
0000-template.mdtotext/0000-my-feature.md(where 'my-feature' is descriptive. don't assign an RFC number yet). - Fill in the RFC. 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 merge request. As a merge request the RFC will receive design feedback from the larger community, and the author should be prepared to revise it in response.
- 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 PR, and leave a comment on the PR explaining your changes. Specifically, do not squash or rebase commits after they are visible on the PR.
Once an RFC becomes active then authors may implement it and submit the feature as a merge request to the Redox 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 Redox 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 RFC's can be done in follow-up PR's. 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.
Some accepted RFC's represent vital features that need to be implemented right away. Other accepted RFC's 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 Redox repository; thus that associated issue can be assigned a priority that the team uses for all issues in the Redox repository.
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 merge requests are tagged with the 'postponed' label when they are closed (as part of the rejection process). An RFC closed with “postponed” 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. Postponed PRs may be re-opened when the time is right.
Usually an RFC merge request marked as “postponed” 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 merge 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 postpone it.)
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.
This text is originally based on an older version of the README from https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs .