watchexec/CONTRIBUTING.md

# Contribution guidebook


This is a fairly free-form project, with low contribution traffic.

Maintainers:

- Félix Saparelli (@passcod) (active)
- Matt Green (@mattgreen) (original author, more passive now)

Currently the project is in an active development period, with the recently-overhauled "library 2.0"
backend enabling a swathe of new features that only remain to be added and then exposed.

Contributions are accepted, but review may be delayed until the above work is finished.

There are a few anti goals:

- Calling watchexec is to be a **simple** exercise that remains intuitive. As a specific point, it
  should not involve any piping or require xargs.

- Watchexec will not be tied to any particular ecosystem or language. Projects that themselves use
  watchexec (the library) can be focused on a particular domain (for example Cargo Watch for Rust),
  but watchexec itself will remain generic, usable for any purpose.


## PR etiquette

- Maintainers are busy or may not have the bandwidth, be patient.
- Do _not_ change the version number in the PR.
- Do _not_ change Cargo.toml or other project metadata, unless specifically asked for, or if that's
  the point of the PR (like adding a crates.io category).

Apart from that, welcome and thank you for your time!


## Releasing

A release goes through these steps:

1. Opening a draft release. Before even merging anything, a draft (only visible privately) release
   is made. These are a github feature and only visible to maintainers. Name the release: which part
   of the project the release is for (`CLI` or `Lib`), and the version. E.g. `CLI 1.18.0`.

2. Adding each change to the draft release. The releases pages on github serves as a changelog, so
   this is worth getting right. One sentence per change, focusing on what it is, what it adds, what
   it changes, if any. Add a link or PR/issue number if relevant. For example:

   > - #160 :warning: Stop initialising the logger in the library code. Downstream users will need
   >   to initialise their own logger if they want debug/warn output.

3. Merging the PRs. Merge commits are preferred over rebase or squash.

4. Cleaning up the code and documentation if needed. For example a PR that adds a flag may not have
   also added the corresponding completions, manpage entries, readme entries. Or two PRs may
   conflict slightly or do the same thing twice, in which case harmonising things is required here.

5. Run `cargo fmt`, `cargo test`, `cargo clippy`, `bin/manpage`. Commit the result, if any.
   CI will also run, wait for that. In the meantime:

6. Run through related issues to the PRs and close them if that wasn't done automatically. Or if the
   PRs only fixed a problem partially, chime in to mention that, and to restate what remains to fix.

7. "Real" test the new code. If new options were added, test those.

8. Check for any dependency updates with `cargo outdated -R`.

9. Run `bin/cli-version 1.2.3` where `1.2.3` is the new version number. This will tag and push,
   triggering the GitHub Action for releases. Use `bin/lib-version` to release a library update.

10. Wait for all builds to complete, then attach the draft release to the tag, and publish it.

11. Run the `cargo publish`.

12. Announce the release.

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