For changes more substantial than simple bugfixes and documentation improvements we ask that these be put through a very lightweight design review process.
"RFC" stands for "request for comments" and are used, e.g. by rust-lang, to establish a consistent and controlled path for new features to enter their project, so that new contributors can anticipate the short- and long-term development roadmap of the project.
- Introduction
- Table of Contents
- When should you write an RFC
- Motivation for RFCs
- Before creating an RFC
- What the process is
You should provide an RFC if you intend to make a significant change or contribution to one of Cartographer's repositories. A change is e.g. significant if it introduces a new or modifies an existing concept. The process is really very lightweight so we encourage you to err on the side of RFCs.
Make sure to have one sentence per line in the RFC as it makes reading diffs much easier. There is no characters per line limit for RFCs.
Before the introduction of RFCs reviewer's would sometimes spend time reading incoming PRs trying to find out what the problem is the author is actually solving. This could slow down reviews considerably which is unfortunate for both the reviewer and contributor.
Sometimes a PR could sit in the review queue for a long time as it was modifying code that was undergoing a refactoring and merging it would make that refactoring harder. So the purpose of a RFC is both to vet incoming feature proposals and also allow other contributors to learn about on-going projects and coordinate better.
Before opening an RFC we ask you to briefly look over the list of RFCs being discussed or implemented. If your RFC conflicts with another RFC please inject yourself into the discussion by either commenting on the RFCs PR or opening an issue about the RFC being implemented in this repository.
Follow this process to get your feature merged into Cartographer.
- Fork the RFC repo RFC repository
- Copy
0000-template.mdtotext/0000-my-feature.md(where "my-feature" is descriptive. Don't assign an RFC number yet). - Fill in the RFC.
- Submit a pull request. As a pull request the RFC will receive design feedback from the larger community, and the author should be prepared to revise it in response.
- When consensus about the RFC has been reached the corresponding PR will be approved and the PR merged.
- The person that actually merges the PR will create a new project for the duration of the implementation (which might span several PRs) in the projects pane of the Cartographer repository and assign an RFC number.
- When you create implementing PRs, please add a link to the RFC in the PR description.