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CONTRIBUTING.md

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Contributing

Thank you for your interest in go-toml! We appreciate you considering contributing to go-toml!

The main goal is the project is to provide an easy-to-use and efficient TOML implementation for Go that gets the job done and gets out of your way – dealing with TOML is probably not the central piece of your project.

As the single maintainer of go-toml, time is scarce. All help, big or small, is more than welcomed!

Ask questions

Any question you may have, somebody else might have it too. Always feel free to ask them on the discussion board. We will try to answer them as clearly and quickly as possible, time permitting.

Asking questions also helps us identify areas where the documentation needs improvement, or new features that weren't envisioned before. Sometimes, a seemingly innocent question leads to the fix of a bug. Don't hesitate and ask away!

Improve the documentation

The best way to share your knowledge and experience with go-toml is to improve the documentation. Fix a typo, clarify an interface, add an example, anything goes!

The documentation is present in the README and thorough the source code. On release, it gets updated on pkg.go.dev. To make a change to the documentation, create a pull request with your proposed changes. For simple changes like that, the easiest way to go is probably the "Fork this project and edit the file" button on Github, displayed at the top right of the file. Unless it's a trivial change (for example a typo), provide a little bit of context in your pull request description or commit message.

Report a bug

Found a bug! Sorry to hear that :(. Help us and other track them down and fix by reporting it. File a new bug report on the issues tracker. The template should provide enough guidance on what to include. When in doubt: add more details! By reducing ambiguity and providing more information, it decreases back and forth and saves everyone time.

Code changes

Want to contribute a patch? Very happy to hear that!

First, some high-level rules:

  • A short proposal with some POC code is better than a lengthy piece of text with no code. Code speaks louder than words. That being said, bigger changes should probably start with a discussion.
  • No backward-incompatible patch will be accepted unless discussed. Sometimes it's hard, but we try not to break people's programs unless we absolutely have to.
  • If you are writing a new feature or extending an existing one, make sure to write some documentation.
  • Bug fixes need to be accompanied with regression tests.
  • New code needs to be tested.
  • Your commit messages need to explain why the change is needed, even if already included in the PR description.

It does sound like a lot, but those best practices are here to save time overall and continuously improve the quality of the project, which is something everyone benefits from.

Get started

The fairly standard code contribution process looks like that:

  1. Fork the project.
  2. Make your changes, commit on any branch you like.
  3. Open up a pull request
  4. Review, potential ask for changes.
  5. Merge.

Feel free to ask for help! You can create draft pull requests to gather some early feedback!

Run the tests

You can run tests for go-toml using Go's test tool: go test -race ./....

During the pull request process, all tests will be ran on Linux, Windows, and MacOS on the last two versions of Go.

However, given GitHub's new policy to not run Actions on pull requests until a maintainer clicks on button, it is highly recommended that you run them locally as you make changes.

Check coverage

We use go tool cover to compute test coverage. Most code editors have a way to run and display code coverage, but at the end of the day, we do this:

go test -covermode=atomic -coverprofile=coverage.out
go tool cover -func=coverage.out

and verify that the overall percentage of tested code does not go down. This is a requirement. As a rule of thumb, all lines of code touched by your changes should be covered. On Unix you can use ./ci.sh coverage -d v2 to check if your code lowers the coverage.

Verify performance

Go-toml aims to stay efficient. We rely on a set of scenarios executed with Go's builtin benchmark systems. Because of their noisy nature, containers provided by Github Actions cannot be reliably used for benchmarking. As a result, you are responsible for checking that your changes do not incur a performance penalty. You can run their following to execute benchmarks:

go test ./... -bench=. -count=10

Benchmark results should be compared against each other with benchstat. Typical flow looks like this:

  1. On the v2 branch, run go test ./... -bench=. -count 10 and save output to a file (for example old.txt).
  2. Make some code changes.
  3. Run go test .... again, and save the output to an other file (for example new.txt).
  4. Run benchstat old.txt new.txt to check that time/op does not go up in any test.

On Unix you can use ./ci.sh benchmark -d v2 to verify how your code impacts performance.

It is highly encouraged to add the benchstat results to your pull request description. Pull requests that lower performance will receive more scrutiny.

Style

Try to look around and follow the same format and structure as the rest of the code. We enforce using go fmt on the whole code base.

Maintainers-only

Merge pull request

Checklist:

  • Passing CI.
  • Does not introduce backward-incompatible changes (unless discussed).
  • Has relevant doc changes.
  • Benchstat does not show performance regression.
  • Pull request is labeled appropriately.
  • Title will be understandable in the changelog.
  1. Merge using "squash and merge".
  2. Make sure to edit the commit message to keep all the useful information nice and clean.
  3. Make sure the commit title is clear and contains the PR number (#123).

New release

  1. Decide on the next version number. Use semver. Review commits since last version to assess.
  2. Tag release. For example:
git checkout v2
git pull
git tag v2.2.0
git push --tags
  1. CI automatically builds a draft Github release. Review it and edit as necessary. Look for "Other changes". That would indicate a pull request not labeled properly. Tweak labels and pull request titles until changelog looks good for users.
  2. Check "create discussion" box, in the "Releases" category.
  3. If new version is an alpha or beta only, check pre-release box.