Exonum RFC process is partially derived from the Rust RFC process
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 Exonum community.
The "RFC" (Request for Comments) process is intended to provide a consistent and controlled path for new features to enter Exonum, so that all stakeholders can be confident about the direction the Exonum project is evolving in.
You need to follow this process if you intend to make "substantial" changes to Exonum core 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, but may include the following.
exonum crate.Some changes do not require an RFC:
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.
A hastily-proposed RFC can significantly reduce chances of its 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.
The most common preparations for writing and submitting an RFC include talking the idea over on Gitter, filing and discussing ideas on the RFC issue tracker.
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 Exonum, one must first get the RFC merged into the RFC repository as a markdown file. At that point the RFC is "active" and may be implemented to be included into Exonum.
0000-template.md to text/0000-my-feature.md (where "my-feature" is
descriptive. Don't assign RFC number just yet).text/ directory.Once the RFC becomes "active" the author may implement it and submit the feature as a pull request to the Exonum 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 an Exonum developer has been assigned the task of implementing the feature. While it is not necessary that the author of the RFC also writes the implementation, it is by far the most effective way to see the 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 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 presented in the form of new RFCs, with a note added to the original RFC.
While the RFC pull request is up, the shepherd may schedule meetings with the author and/or relevant stakeholders to discuss the issues in greater detail. In either case a summary from the meeting will be posted back to the RFC pull request.
The maintainers of related repositories make 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 the 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 the thread, the maintainer of the RFC repository 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 Exonum repository; the associated issue can be assigned a priority via the triage process that the team uses for all issues in the Exonum repository.
The author of the 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 "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. Historically, "postponed" was used to postpone features until after 1.0. Postponed pull requests may be re-opened when the time is right.
Usually an RFC pull 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 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 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.
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