Amethyst RFCs

• Discussing RFCs
• Accepted RFCs
• RFCs Awaiting Implementation

Opening

Many changes, including bug fixes and documentation improvements can be implemented and reviewed via the 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 Amethyst community and the [sub-team]s.

The "Request for Comments" (RFC) process is intended to provide a consistent and controlled path for new features to enter the engine and associated libraries, so that all stakeholders can be confident about the direction in which the engine is evolving.

You may join our Discord here and the Amethyst Community Forum here: https://community.amethyst-engine.org.

Table of Contents

• Opening
• Table of Contents
• When you need to follow this process
  • Sub-team Specific Guidelines
• Before creating an RFC
• What the process is
• Tracking Issues
  • Labels and Tags
• The RFC life-cycle
  • Reviewing RFCs
  • Implementing an RFC
  • RFC Postponement
• Help this is all too informal!
• License

When you need to follow this process

You need to follow this process if you intend to make "substantial" changes to Amethyst, its component crates, or the RFC process itself. The definition of substantial is somewhat fluid, and to an extent set by the community. Some examples might include:

• A change to a different crate used for physics calculations
• Changes to how the editor communicates with the engine
• Significant protocol changes to the networking library
• Anything that has the potential to produce a substantial negative impact on users

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-amethyst, invisible to users-of-amethyst.
• More tests and benchmarks.
• Convenience functions or quality of life improvements that do not affect current functionality or backwards compatibility.

If you submit a pull request that ends up being generating a lot of discussion or pushback, you may be asked to submit an RFC. What seems to be a minor change can have unintended consequences other teams might see.

Sub-team specific guidelines

For more details on when an RFC is required for the following areas, please see the Amethyst community's [sub-team] specific guidelines for:

• Networking changes
• Renderer changes
• Engine changes
• Web changes

Before creating an RFC

A hastily-proposed RFC 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 RFC can make the process smoother.

Although there is no single way to prepare for submitting an RFC, it is generally a good idea to pursue feedback from other project developers beforehand, to ascertain that the RFC 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 RFC include talking the idea over on the Discord channel, specifically with the applicable sub-team and discussing it on our Amethyst Community Forums

We welcome all ideas and strive to provide kind but useful feedback. While not every proposal will make it through, that should in no way discourage anyone from continuing to make proposals in the future.

If the proposal is promising and someone is new to the RFC process, we will do our best to find someone to mentor them through the process.

What the process is

In short, to get a major feature added to Amethyst, one must first get the RFC merged into the RFC repository as a markdown file. At that point the RFC is approved and may be implemented with the goal of eventual inclusion into Amethyst.

• Fork the RFC repo [RFC repository]
• Copy 0000-template.md to text/0000-my-feature.md (where "my-feature" is descriptive. Don't assign an RFC number yet).
• Fill in the RFC. Put care into the details: RFCs 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 RFC 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. RFCs 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 RFC assignee in particular to get help identifying stakeholders and obstacles.
• The sub-team will discuss the RFC 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.
• RFCs rarely go through this process unchanged, especially as alternatives and drawbacks are shown. You can make edits, big and small, to the RFC 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 RFC (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 RFC thread (which is usually impossible). However, the argument supporting the disposition on the RFC 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 RFCs 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 RFC 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 Amethyst. 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 RFC 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.

Tracking Issues

These are issues created on GitHub that track the implementation progress of the RFC. They link to related issues, have checkboxes, or other structures that make them more of a meta-issue than an issue for adding a specific feature or fixing a bug.

This issue is one the sub-team will create, not one you need to create.

Labels and Tags

We use the following tags for RFC tracking issues:

• RFC: Proposed
• RFC: Accepted
• RFC: Declined
• RFC: Complete
• RFC: Postponed

See the life-cycle section below for details on what these mean.

The RFC life-cycle

When an RFC is first created, a tracking issue is created and given the label "RFC: Proposed".

Once an RFC becomes approved, the tracking issue will be tagged with the label "RFC: Accepted". Authors may implement it and submit the feature as a pull request to the Amethyst repo. Being approved 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 RFC has been accepted and is approved implies nothing about what priority is assigned to its implementation, nor does it imply anything about whether an Amethyst developer has been assigned the task of implementing the feature. While it is not necessary that the author of the RFC also write the implementation, it is by far the most effective way to see an RFC through to completion: authors should not expect that other project developers will take on responsibility for implementing their accepted feature.

Modifications to approved RFCs can be done in follow-up pull requests. In order for a PR that deviates from the RFC standard, a new RFC that follows the accepted guidelines should be written and contain a link to the prior version.

We strive to write each RFC 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 RFC to actually reflect what the end result will be at the time of the next major release.

In general, once accepted, RFCs should not be substantially changed. They should be as detailed as possible so that only very minor changes are needed as amendments. More substantial changes should be new RFCs, with a note added to the original RFC. Exactly what counts as a "very minor change" is up to the sub-team to decide; check Sub-team specific guidelines for more details.

Reviewing RFCs

While the RFC 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 RFC pull request.

A sub-team makes final decisions about RFCs 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 RFC 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. In the case of the RFC being closed, the tag "RFC: Declined" will be added to the tracking issue. If it is merged, it will receive the tag "RFC: Accepted".

Implementing an RFC

Some accepted RFCs represent vital features that need to be implemented right away. Other accepted RFCs can represent features that can wait until some arbitrary developer feels like doing the work. Every accepted RFC has an associated issue tracking its implementation in the Amethyst repository; thus that associated issue can be assigned a priority via the triage process that the team uses for all issues in the Amethyst repository.

The author of an RFC is not obligated to implement it. Of course, the RFC author (like any other developer) is welcome to post an implementation for review after the RFC has been accepted. A prototype or other supporting materials (data flow diagrams, architecture diagrams, aggregations of posts from the community) can all help demonstrate the need and the priority of the RFC.

If you are interested in working on the implementation for an approved RFC, 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).

Once an RFC has been implemented, the tracking issue will be closed and given the label "RFC: Complete".

RFC Postponement

Some RFC pull requests are tagged with the "RFC: Postponed" label when they are closed (as part of the rejection process). An RFC closed with "RFC: 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. 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 RFC pull request marked as "RFC: 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 RFC 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 RFC, not postpone it.)

Help! This is all too informal

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.

Amethyst Community Forums

License

All code in repositories under the amethyst/ organization is Apache 2.0 or MIT licensed while all assets are Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licensed if not otherwise stated.

• Apache License, Version 2.0, (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)
• CC BY-SA 4.0 (LICENSE-CCBYSA or https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/)

Contributions

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 dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.