Internal contribution guide

General rules

Here are a couple of points to remember when starting development in Membrane:

• When moving a task from "Backlog" to "To do" replace any notes with issue in proper repo and assign yourself.
• Create a branch with a meaningful name
• You can open a draft PR right away.
• Remember to link the issue to the PR (either by adding Closes # and PR number or using the UI)
• Try to avoid making huge PRs - if the feature you're working on is big, create draft PR with a list of steps and ask for review as early as possible. You can smaller PRs from sub-task branches and use the main as master for this feature
• When finished assign a reviewer. Ask during stand-up meeting who can do the review. You need at least one approval from one of the core team members and passing CI tests to merge new features.
• Always remove your branch after merging the PR. It should happen automatically. If not, enable that in settings (or ask someone with permissions to do this)

Creating new plugin/repo

• Each new plugin should have its own repo and hex package
• The plugin should contain one or more elements related to the same format/protocol (e.g. H264 plugin may contain decoder, encoder and parser)
• One plugin should only depend on at most one native library, so if you need separate libraries for decoder and encoder each should be a separate plugin
• When starting development you should create new repo based on https://github.com/membraneframework/membrane_template_plugin, enable CI and create branch (often called develop) and follow the usual steps.

Naming

• Pure Elixir plugins:
  • Repo: membrane_X_plugin where X is format/protocol name (e.g. membrane_mpegts_plugin)
  • Application: :membrane_X_plugin
  • Modules: Membrane.X.* (e.g. Membrane.AAC.Parser)
• Plugins wrapping native library:
  • Repo: membrane_X_LIB_plugin where X is format/protocol name and LIB - the library (e.g. membrane_aac_fdk_plugin)
  • Application: :membrane_X_LIB_plugin
  • Modules: Membrane.X.LIB.* (e.g. Membrane.AAC.FDK.Decoder)
• Format definition (former caps):
  • Repo: membrane_X_format where X is the format name (e.g. membrane_aac_format)
  • Application: :membrane_X_format
  • Format struct: %Membrane.X{} (e.g. %Membrane.AAC{channels: 2})
  • Other modules: Membrane.X.*, the same namespace as plugins for this format (e.g. Membrane.AAC.*)