Welcome to the Linkerd GSoC program!

This repository contains everything you need to know about the program.

• Official website: https://linkerd.io/gsoc
• Linkerd slack (#gsoc channel): https://linkerd.slack.com

The RFC process is intended to provide a consistent and controlled path for contributions to enter the Linkerd project, so that all stakeholders can be confident about the project direction and maintainability of the codebase.

All GSoC students are required to submit a RFC for the GSoC project that they are interested in.

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 our Linkerd Slack, #contributors, or discussing the topic on our CNCF developer 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 is a good indication that the RFC is worth pursuing.

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

1. Fork the GSoC repository
2. Copy templates/rfc.md to rfc/year/project-name/your-github-handle.md.
3. Fill in the RFC, starting with Step 1 - the proposal.
4. Submit a pull request. As a pull request the RFC will receive feedback from the larger community, and the author should be prepared to revise it in response.
5. Each pull request will be labeled with the most relevant reviewer, who will lead its triage.
6. 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.
7. The 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.
8. Repeat this process with a follow up pull request that integrates the feedback, and completes Step 2 - the Design. Put care into the details: RFCs that do not present convincing motivation, demonstrate lack of understanding of the design's impact, or are disingenuous about the drawbacks or alternatives tend to be poorly-received.

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.

Once an RFC is tagged as "active" then authors may implement it and submit the feature as a series of pull requests to the Linkerd2 repo. 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.

Modifications to "active" RFCs can be done in follow-up pull requests. 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. Only very minor changes should be submitted 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 team to decide.

Every accepted RFC has an associated issue tracking its implementation in the Linkerd2 repository. The issue will be assigned to the RFC author.

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:

• Apache License, Version 2.0, (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
• https://github.com/linkerd/linkerd2/blob/master/LICENSE

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.