deb-swift/CONTRIBUTING.rst

If you would like to contribute to the development of OpenStack, you must follow the steps in this page: http://docs.openstack.org/infra/manual/developers.html

Once those steps have been completed, changes to OpenStack should be submitted for review via the Gerrit tool, following the workflow documented at http://docs.openstack.org/infra/manual/developers.html#development-workflow.

Gerrit is the review system used in the OpenStack projects. We're sorry, but we won't be able to respond to pull requests submitted through GitHub.

Bugs should be filed on Launchpad, not in GitHub's issue tracker.

Swift Design Principles

• The Zen of Python
• Simple Scales
• Minimal dependencies
• Re-use existing tools and libraries when reasonable
• Leverage the economies of scale
• Small, loosely coupled RESTful services
• No single points of failure
• Start with the use case
• ... then design from the cluster operator up
• If you haven't argued about it, you don't have the right answer yet :)
• If it is your first implementation, you probably aren't done yet :)

Please don't feel offended by difference of opinion. Be prepared to advocate for your change and iterate on it based on feedback. Reach out to other people working on the project on IRC or the mailing list - we want to help.

Recommended workflow

• Set up a Swift All-In-One VM(SAIO).
• Make your changes. Docs and tests for your patch must land before or with your patch.
• Run unit tests, functional tests, probe tests ./.unittests ./.functests ./.probetests
• Run tox (no command-line args needed)
• git review

Notes on Testing

Running the tests above against Swift in your development environment (ie your SAIO) will catch most issues. Any patch you propose is expected to be both tested and documented and all tests should pass.

If you want to run just a subset of the tests while you are developing, you can use nosetests:

cd test/unit/common/middleware/ && nosetests test_healthcheck.py

To check which parts of your code are being exercised by a test, you can run tox and then point your browser to swift/cover/index.html:

tox -e py27 -- test.unit.common.middleware.test_healthcheck:TestHealthCheck.test_healthcheck

Swift's unit tests are designed to test small parts of the code in isolation. The functional tests validate that the entire system is working from an external perspective (they are "black-box" tests). You can even run functional tests against public Swift endpoints. The probetests are designed to test much of Swift's internal processes. For example, a test may write data, intentionally corrupt it, and then ensure that the correct processes detect and repair it.

When your patch is submitted for code review, it will automatically be tested on the OpenStack CI infrastructure. In addition to many of the tests above, it will also be tested by several other OpenStack test jobs.

Once your patch has been reviewed and approved by two core reviewers and has passed all automated tests, it will be merged into the Swift source tree.

Specs

The swift-specs_ repo can be used for collaborative design work before a feature is implemented.

OpenStack's gerrit system is used to collaborate on the design spec. Once approved OpenStack provides a doc site to easily read these specs

A spec is needed for more impactful features. Coordinating a feature between many devs (especially across companies) is a great example of when a spec is needed. If you are unsure if a spec document is needed, please feel free to ask in #openstack-swift on freenode IRC.