Contributing

Coding Standards

Follow PEP8. All code is currently PEP 8 compliant and it should stay this way.

All code must be licensed using GPL v2.0 or later and must have a SPDX License Identifier stating this. A copyright line should be included on new files and may be added for significant changes to existing files.

# Patchwork - automated patch tracking system
# Copyright (C) 2000 Jane Doe <jane.doe@example.com>
# Copyright (C) 2001 Joe Bloggs <joebloggs@example.com>
#
# SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0-or-later

Changes that fix semantic issues will be happily received, but please keep such changes separate from functional changes.

Patchwork uses the pre-commit framework to allow automated style checks when committing code. This is opt-in but avoids the need to manually run style checks on commits. Pre-commit can be installed and enabled like so:

$ pip install --user pre-commit
$ pre-commit install --allow-missing-config

Once installed, the various checks listed in .pre-commit-config.yaml will be run on changed files when committing. It is also possible to run the checks on all files manually:

$ pre-commit run --all-files

In addition to pre-commit, we provide tox targets for style checks. These are used by CI and can be useful if checking all files manually. Refer to the Testing section below for more information on usage of this tool.

Testing

Patchwork includes a tox script to automate testing. This requires a functional database and some Python requirements like tox. Refer to Installation for information on how to configure these.

You may also need to install tox. If so, do this now:

$ pip install --user tox

Tip

If you’re using Docker, you may not need to install tox locally. Instead, it will already be installed inside the container. For Docker, you can run tox like so:

$ docker-compose run --rm web tox [ARGS...]

For more information, refer to Docker-Based Installation.

Assuming these requirements are met, actually testing Patchwork is quite easy to do. To start, you can show the default targets like so:

$ tox -l

You’ll see that this includes a number of targets to run unit tests against the different versions of Django supported, along with some other targets related to code coverage and code quality. To run one of these, use the -e parameter:

$ tox -e py27-django18

In the case of the unit tests targets, you can also run specific tests by passing the fully qualified test name as an additional argument to this command:

$ tox -e py27-django18 patchwork.tests.SubjectCleanUpTest

Because Patchwork support multiple versions of Django, it’s very important that you test against all supported versions. When run without argument, tox will do this:

$ tox

Release Notes

Patchwork uses reno for release note management. To use reno, you must first install it:

$ pip install --user reno

Once installed, a new release note can be created using the reno new command:

$ reno new <slugified-summary-of-change>

Modify the created file, removing any irrelevant sections, and include the modified file in your change.

API

As discussed in Release Process, the API is versioned differently from Patchwork itself. Should you make changes to the API, you need to ensure these only affect newer versions of the API. Refer to previous changes in the patchwork/api directory and to the Django REST Framework documentation for more information.

Important

All API changes should be called out in release notes using the api section.

Reporting Issues

You can report issues to the mailing list or the GitHub issue tracker.

Submitting Changes

All patches should be sent to the mailing list. You must be subscribed to the list in order to submit patches. Please abide by the QEMU guidelines on contributing or submitting patches. This covers both the initial submission and any follow up to the patches. In particular, ensure:

Patches should ideally be submitted using the git send-email tool.

Mailing Lists

Patchwork uses a single mailing list for development, questions and announcements.

Further information about the Patchwork mailing list is available can be found on lists.ozlabs.org.