dart-lightning/lndart.clnLight logolndart.cln

lndart.cln HACKING guide

Table of Content

  • Introduction
  • Code Style
  • Commit Style
  • How to make the release

Introduction

Welcome to the HACKING guide and let's peek into how a day in the life of a lndart.cln maintainer looks like.

After reading this you should be ready to contribute to the repository and also be one of the next maintainers in the future if you would like!

Let's begin

Code style

To ensure consistency throughout the source code, these rules are to be kept in mind:

  • All features or bug fixes must be tested by one or more specs (unit-tests).
  • All public API methods must be documented. (Details TBC).
  • We follow the [Effective Dart: Style Guidelines][dart-style-guide].

If You Don’t Know The Right Thing, Do The Simplest Thing

Sometimes the right way is unclear, so it’s best not to spend time on it. It’s far easier to rewrite simple code than complex code, too.

Use of FIXME

There are two cases in which you should use a /* FIXME: */ comment: one is where an optimization seems possible, but it’s unclear if it’s yet worthwhile, and the second one is in the case of an ugly corner case which could be improved (and may be in a following patch).

There are always compromises in code: eventually, it needs to ship. FIXME is grep-fodder for yourself and others, as well as useful warning signs if we later encounter an issue in some part of the code.

Write For Today: Unused Code Is Buggy Code

Don’t overdesign: complexity is a killer. If you need a fancy data structure, start with a brute force linked list. Once that’s working, perhaps consider your fancy structure, but don’t implement a generic thing. Use /* FIXME: ...*/ to salve your conscience.

Keep Your Patches Reviewable

Try to make a single change at a time. It’s tempting to do “drive-by” fixes as you see other things, and a minimal amount is unavoidable, but you can end up shaving infinite yaks. This is a good time to drop a /* FIXME: ...*/ comment and move on.

Commit Style

The commit style is one of the more important concepts when managing a monorepo like lndart.cln, and in particular, the commit style is used to generate the changelog for the next release.

The commits will follow a dart community guideline with the following rules.

Each commit message consists of a header, a body and a footer. The header has a special format that includes a type, a scope and a subject:

<type>(<scope>): <subject>
<BLANK LINE>
<body>
<BLANK LINE>
<footer>

The header is mandatory while the scope of the header is optional.

All lines in a commit message should be at most 100 characters! This ensures better readability on GitHub as well as in various git tools.

The footer should contain a closing reference to an issue if any.

Some couple of examples are:

docs(changelog): update changelog to beta.5

fix(release): need to depend on the latest rxjs and zone.js

The version in our package.json gets copied to the one we publish, and users need the latest of these.

Types

  • feat: A new feature
  • fix: A bug fix

Scopes

  • rpc: Changes related to the core lightning RPC wrapper package
  • cln_plugin: Changes related to the core lightning plugin API package

Subject

The subject contains a succinct description of the change:

  • use the imperative, present tense: "change" not "changed" nor "changes"
  • don't capitalize the first letter
  • no dot (.) at the end

Body

You are free to put all the content you want inside the body, but if you are fixing an exception or some wrong behavior you must put the details or stacktrace inside the body ensure sure that the search engine indexes it.

An example of commit body is the following one

checker: fixes overloading operation when the type is optimized

The stacktrace is the following one

} expected `Foo` not `Foo` - both operands must be the same type for operator overloading
   11 | }
   12 |
   13 | fn (_ Foo) == (_ Foo) bool {
      |                  ~~~
   14 |     return true
   15 | }


Signed-off-by: Vincenzo Palazzo <vincenzopalazzodev@gmail.com>

How to make the release

This is the most fun part and also is the most difficult one in a monorepo repository.

In particular, lndart.cln has the possibility to release one single package at a time, or all together.

To prepare for the release, these steps must be followed:

  • Bump the version number in the package before the release, and the version inside the changelog.json in the package root;
    • Use a Personal Access Token or generate a new one.
  • Generate the changelog related to the package:
    • export GITHUB_TOKEN="your_token"
    • make {changelog_lib|changelog_cmd|changelog}, where
      • changelog_lib: generate the changelog for changelog_lib;
      • changelog_cmd: generate the changelog for changelog_cmd;
      • changelog: generate both changelogs.
  • Make the Github release: To release a single package we need to create a release with the following tag {package_name}-v{version_number}, and if we make a release with the tag v{version_number} this will release all the packages (useful for a major release of the package).

N.B: Part of this document is stolen from [core lightning] docs (https://github.com/ElementsProject/lightning/blob/master/doc/HACKING.md) by @rustyrussell 's experience.

Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.

  • Someone Cheers!

Vincent

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