Many changes, including bug fixes and documentation improvements can be implemented and reviewed via Jira Issues and a normal GitHub pull request workflow.
Some changes though are "substantial", and we ask that these be put through a bit of a design process and produce a consensus among the Indy community and the sub-teams.
The Indy Improvement Initiative "iii" process is intended to provide a consistent and controlled path for new features to enter the language and standard libraries, so that all stakeholders can be confident about the direction the language is evolving in.
- Opening
- Table of Contents
- When you need to follow this process
- Before creating an III
- What the process is
- The III life-cycle
- Reviewing IIIs
- Implementing an III
- III Postponement
- Help this is all too informal!
- License
- Credits
You need to follow this process if you intend to make "substantial" changes to Indy node, Indy SDK interfaces, Indy Crypto, the Anoncreds protocol, Agent communication protocols or the III process itself. What constitutes a "substantial" change is evolving based on community norms and varies depending on what part of the system you are proposing to change, but may include the following.
- Anything that could break existing APIs or clients.
- Changing parts of the cryptography or protocols.
- Anything affecting consensus
- Changes to permissioning or privacy characteristics of the system.
- Other feature additions that require architecture explainations or documentation.
Some changes do not require an RFC:
- Rephrasing, reorganizing, refactoring, or otherwise "changing shape does not change meaning".
- Additions that strictly improve objective, numerical quality criteria (warning removal, speedup, better platform coverage, more parallelism, trap more errors, etc.)
- Additions only likely to be noticed by other developers-of-indy, invisible to users-of-indy.
If you submit a pull request to implement a new feature without going through the III process, it may be closed with a polite request to submit an III first.
For more details on when an III is required for the following areas, please see the Indy community's sub-team specific guidelines for:
A hastily-proposed III can hurt its chances of acceptance. Low quality proposals, proposals for previously-rejected features, or those that don't fit into the near-term roadmap, may be quickly rejected, which can be demotivating for the unprepared contributor. Laying some groundwork ahead of the III can make the process smoother.
Although there is no single way to prepare for submitting an III, it is generally a good idea to pursue feedback from other project developers beforehand, to ascertain that the III may be desirable; having a consistent impact on the project requires concerted effort toward consensus-building.
The most common preparations for writing and submitting an III include talking the idea over on #indy in Hyperledger Rocket.Chat, discussing the topic on our [mailing list], and occasionally posting "pre-IIIs" on the mailing list. You may file issues on this repo for discussion, but these are not actively looked at by the teams.
As a rule of thumb, receiving encouraging feedback from long-standing project developers, and particularly members of the relevant sub-team is a good indication that the III is worth pursuing.
In short, to get a major feature added to Indy, one must first get the III merged into the III repository as a markdown file. At that point the III is "active" and may be implemented with the goal of eventual inclusion into Indy.
- Fork the indy-rfc repo III repository
- Copy
0000-template.mdtotext/0000-my-feature.md(where "my-feature" is descriptive. don't assign an III number yet). - Fill in the III. Put care into the details: IIIs that do not present convincing motivation, demonstrate understanding of the impact of the design, or are disingenuous about the drawbacks or alternatives tend to be poorly-received.
- Submit a pull request. As a pull request the III will receive design feedback from the larger community, and the author should be prepared to revise it in response.
- Each pull request will be labeled with the most relevant sub-team, which will lead to its being triaged by that team in a future meeting and assigned to a member of the subteam.
- Build consensus and integrate feedback. IIIs that have broad support are much more likely to make progress than those that don't receive any comments. Feel free to reach out to the III assignee in particular to get help identifying stakeholders and obstacles.
- The sub-team will discuss the III pull request, as much as possible in the comment thread of the pull request itself. Offline discussion will be summarized on the pull request comment thread.
- IIIs rarely go through this process unchanged, especially as alternatives and drawbacks are shown. You can make edits, big and small, to the III to clarify or change the design, but make changes as new commits to the pull request, and leave a comment on the pull request explaining your changes. Specifically, do not squash or rebase commits after they are visible on the pull request.
- At some point, a member of the subteam will propose a "motion for final
comment period" (FCP), along with a disposition for the III (merge, close,
or postpone).
- This step is taken when enough of the tradeoffs have been discussed that the subteam is in a position to make a decision. That does not require consensus amongst all participants in the III thread (which is usually impossible). However, the argument supporting the disposition on the III needs to have already been clearly articulated, and there should not be a strong consensus against that position outside of the subteam. Subteam members use their best judgment in taking this step, and the FCP itself ensures there is ample time and notification for stakeholders to push back if it is made prematurely.
- For IIIs with lengthy discussion, the motion to FCP is usually preceded by a summary comment trying to lay out the current state of the discussion and major tradeoffs/points of disagreement.
- Before actually entering FCP, all members of the subteam must sign off; this is often the point at which many subteam members first review the III in full depth.
- The FCP lasts ten calendar days, so that it is open for at least 5 business days. It is also advertised widely, e.g. in This Week in Indy. This way all stakeholders have a chance to lodge any final objections before a decision is reached.
- In most cases, the FCP period is quiet, and the III is either merged or closed. However, sometimes substantial new arguments or ideas are raised, the FCP is canceled, and the RFC goes back into development mode.
Once an III becomes "active" then authors may implement it and submit the feature as a pull request to the appropriate Indy repos. Being "active" is not a rubber stamp, and in particular still does not mean the feature will ultimately be merged; it does mean that in principle all the major stakeholders have agreed to the feature and are amenable to merging it.
Furthermore, the fact that a given III has been accepted and is "active" implies nothing about what priority is assigned to its implementation, nor does it imply anything about whether an Indy developer has been assigned the task of implementing the feature. While it is not necessary that the author of the III also write the implementation, it is by far the most effective way to see an III through to completion: authors should not expect that other project developers will take on responsibility for implementing their accepted feature.
Modifications to "active" IIIs can be done in follow-up pull requests. We strive to write each III in a manner that it will reflect the final design of the feature; but the nature of the process means that we cannot expect every merged III to actually reflect what the end result will be at the time of the next major release.
In general, once accepted, IIIs should not be substantially changed. Only very minor changes should be submitted as amendments. More substantial changes should be new IIIs, with a note added to the original III. Exactly what counts as a "very minor change" is up to the sub-team to decide; check Sub-team specific guidelines for more details.
While the III pull request is up, the sub-team may schedule meetings with the author and/or relevant stakeholders to discuss the issues in greater detail, and in some cases the topic may be discussed at a sub-team meeting. In either case a summary from the meeting will be posted back to the III pull request.
A sub-team makes final decisions about IIIs after the benefits and drawbacks are well understood. These decisions can be made at any time, but the sub-team will regularly issue decisions. When a decision is made, the III pull request will either be merged or closed. In either case, if the reasoning is not clear from the discussion in thread, the sub-team will add a comment describing the rationale for the decision.
Some accepted IIIs represent vital features that need to be implemented right away. Other accepted IIIs can represent features that can wait until some arbitrary developer feels like doing the work. Every accepted III should have an associated issue tracking its implementation in an Indy Jira project; thus that associated issue can be assigned a priority via the triage process that the team uses for all issues in their Jira repository.
The author of an III is not obligated to implement it. Of course, the III author (like any other developer) is welcome to post an implementation for review after the III has been accepted.
If you are interested in working on the implementation for an "active" III, but cannot determine if someone else is already working on it, feel free to ask (e.g. by leaving a comment on the associated issue).
Some III pull requests are tagged with the "postponed" label when they are closed (as part of the rejection process). An III closed with "postponed" is marked as such because we want neither to think about evaluating the proposal nor about implementing the described feature until some time in the future, and we believe that we can afford to wait until then to do so. Currently, "postponed" is used to postpone features until after Hyperledger General Availability. Postponed pull requests may be re-opened when the time is right. We don't have any formal process for that, you should ask members of the relevant sub-team.
Usually an III pull request marked as "postponed" has already passed an informal first round of evaluation, namely the round of "do we think we would ever possibly consider making this change, as outlined in the III pull request, or some semi-obvious variation of it." (When the answer to the latter question is "no", then the appropriate response is to close the III, not postpone it.)
The process is intended to be as lightweight as reasonable for the present circumstances. As usual, we are trying to let the process be driven by consensus and community norms, not impose more structure than necessary.
This repository is currently licensed under the
- Apache License, Version 2.0, (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.
This document was derived from the Rust RFC process found at https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs. The Rust project and its developers are not responsible for the III process or its content. If you have questions about Indy Improvement Initiatives or the Indy Improvement Initiative process please start discussions on the Hyperledger Indy mailing list or log an issue at https://jira.hyperledger.org/projects/INDY and add it to the "Process" Epic.