How to manage pull requests

Managing Pull Requests on Github

Use of draft state is highly encouraged such that we can give early feedback (apply to all contributors).

To give an example, as soon as some code can be shown, open a Pull Request and push your code. Keep it as a draft such that we know that more work is needed but people can start offering early feedback.

Review States

A review is going through different states. Those are the following:

• it is submitted as a draft. Review will be best effort and pinging somebody to do it is encouraged.
• it is submitted as ready to review. Review will eventually be done. Once a review is done and we are ready to accept the code, another round of review will happen focused on cleaning the history. Doing it late help easily see what is going on (comments, fixes, ...).
• Review comments are addressed and history is clean, two people with commit rights (preferably at least one Nextcloud GmbH employee) accept it. It is then merged by author or approvers.

During review

A review will most often included several round of comments from reviewers.

Author will then address the comment is additional commits that are added to the branch under review. That will help see what is going on.

At the end people will approve the pull request. At that time, another round of review will happen focused on the history. We want to have a clean history with self-contained commits that all compile and have a message helping understanding why a change is being done.

After review

A branch under review will always be rebased before it can be merged.