Trigger Development

The Trigger developement team is currently a one-man operation lead by Jathan McCollum, aka jathanism.

Contributing

There are several ways to get involved with Trigger:

• Use Trigger and send us feedback! This is the best and easiest to improve the project – let us know how you currently use Trigger and how you want to use it. (Please search the ticket tracker first, though, when submitting feature ideas.)
• Report bugs. If you use Trigger and think you’ve found a bug, check on the ticket tracker to see if anyone’s reported it yet, and if not – file a bug! If you can, please try to make sure you can replicate the problem, and provide us with the info we need to reproduce it ourselves (what version of Trigger you’re using, what platform you’re on, and what exactly you were doing when the bug cropped up.)
• Submit patches or new features. Make a Github account, create a fork of the main Trigger repository, and submit a pull request.

All contributors will receive proper attribution for their work. We want to give credit where it is due!

Communication

If an issue ticket exists for a given issue, please keep all communication in that ticket’s comments. Otherwise, please use whatever avenue of communication works best for you!

Style

Trigger tries very diligently to honor PEP-8, especially (but not limited to!) the following:

• Keep all lines under 80 characters. This goes for the ReST documentation as well as code itself.
  • Exceptions are made for situations where breaking a long string (such as a string being print-ed from source code, or an especially long URL link in documentation) would be kind of a pain.
• Typical Python 4-space (soft-tab) indents. No tabs! No 8 space indents! (No 2- or 3-space indents, for that matter!)
• CamelCase class names, but lowercase_underscore_separated everything else.

Branching/Repository Layout

While Trigger’s development methodology isn’t set in stone yet, the following items detail how we currently organize the Git repository and expect to perform merges and so forth. This will be chiefly of interest to those who wish to follow a specific Git branch instead of released versions, or to any contributors.

• Completed feature work is merged into the master branch, and once enough new features are done, a new release branch is created and optionally used to create prerelease versions for testing – or simply released as-is.
• While we try our best not to commit broken code or change APIs without warning, as with many other open-source projects we can only have a guarantee of stability in the release branches. Only follow master (or, even worse, feature branches!) if you’re willing to deal with a little pain.
• Bugfixes are to be performed on release branches and then merged into master so that master is always up-to-date (or nearly so; while it’s not mandatory to merge after every bugfix, doing so at least daily is a good idea.)

Releases

We use semantic versioning. Version numbers should follow this format:

{Major version}.{Minor version}.{Revision number}.{Build number (optional)}

Major

Major releases update the first number, e.g. going from 0.9 to 1.0, and indicate that the software has reached some very large milestone.

For example, the 1.0 release signified a commitment to a medium to long term API and some significant backwards incompatible (compared to the 0.9 series) features. Version 2.0 might indicate a rewrite using a new underlying network technology or an overhaul to be more object-oriented.

Major releases will often be backwards-incompatible with the previous line of development, though this is not a requirement, just a usual happenstance. Users should expect to have to make at least some changes to their fabfiles when switching between major versions.

Minor

Minor releases, such as moving from 1.0 to 1.1, typically mean that one or more new, large features has been added. They are also sometimes used to mark off the fact that a lot of bug fixes or small feature modifications have occurred since the previous minor release. (And, naturally, some of them will involve both at the same time.)

These releases are guaranteed to be backwards-compatible with all other releases containing the same major version number, so a fabfile that works with 1.0 should also work fine with 1.1 or even 1.9.

Bugfix/tertiary

The third and final part of version numbers, such as the ‘3’ in 1.0.3, generally indicate a release containing one or more bugfixes, although minor feature modifications may (rarely) occur.

This third number is sometimes omitted for the first major or minor release in a series, e.g. 1.2 or 2.0, and in these cases it can be considered an implicit zero (e.g. 2.0.0).