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Contributing

Welcome to OpenTelemetry specifications repository!

Before you start - see OpenTelemetry general contributing requirements and recommendations.

Sign the CLA

Before you can contribute, you will need to sign the Contributor License Agreement.

Proposing a change

Significant changes should go through the OpenTelemetry Enhancement Proposal process.

Smaller changes can follow a shorter process:

  • Create an issue in this repo and describe the proposed change.
  • Follow the issue workflow and make sure the issue is accepted with a "Yes" response. If the response to the issue is not "Yes" then do not create a PR that implements the change since it will be rejected.
  • If a Pull Request would be beneficial to illustrate the idea better and to show its effect on the specification, a Draft PR may be opened and linked to the issue even before the proposed idea is accepted there.
  • Once the issue is accepted the assignee can work on it and create a PR that implements the change described in the issue.
  • In the PR description, provide links to the prototypes. Depending on the scope of the change, prototyping in multiple programming languages might be required by the specification approvers. When proposing new features, we encounter a chicken or the egg problem in that proposals require prototyping but language implementations require features to be in the specification. For this reason, when adding new features with Development maturity level, a prototype is defined as a working demonstration of the feature in a language implementation which has the support of that language's maintainers. For example, this may be an unmerged PR with an indication of maintainers' intent to merge in the event the corresponding specification PR is merged.

Trivial changes, such as clarifications, wording changes, spelling/grammar corrections, etc. can be made directly via pull requests and do not require an associated issue.

Writing specs

Specification is written in markdown format. Please make sure files are rendered correctly on GitHub.

Be sure to clearly define the specification requirements using appropriate keywords as defined in Notation Conventions and Compliance, while making sure to heed the guidance laid out in RFC2119 about the sparing use of imperatives:

Imperatives of the type defined in this memo must be used with care and sparingly. In particular, they MUST only be used where it is actually required for interoperation or to limit behavior which has potential for causing harm (e.g., limiting retransmissions) For example, they must not be used to try to impose a particular method on implementors where the method is not required for interoperability.

It is important to build a specification that is clear and useful, not one that is needlessly restrictive and complex.

Please see Specification Principles for more information.

Consistency Checks

The Specification has a number of tools it uses to check things like style, spelling and link validity. Before using the tools:

  • Install the latest LTS release of Node. For example, using nvm under Linux run:

    nvm install --lts

  • Install tooling packages:

    npm install

You can perform all checks locally using this command:

make check

Note: This can take a long time as it checks all links. You should use this prior to submitting a PR to ensure validity. However, you can run individual checks directly.

See:

Autoformatting

The Specification has some autogenerated components and additionally can do automatic style/spell correction. You can run all of this via:

make fix

You can also run these fixes individually.

See:

Markdown style

Markdown files should be properly formatted before a pull request is sent out. In this repository we follow the markdownlint rules with some customizations. See markdownlint or settings for details.

We highly encourage to use line breaks in markdown files at 80 characters wide. There are tools that can do it for you effectively. Please submit proposal to include your editor settings required to enable this behavior so the out of the box settings for this repository will be consistent.

To check for style violations, run:

make markdownlint

To fix style violations, follow the instruction with the Node version of markdownlint. If you are using Visual Studio Code, you can also use the fixAll command of the vscode markdownlint extension.

Misspell check

In addition, please make sure to clean up typos before you submit the change.

To check for typos, run the following command:

make misspell

NOTE: The misspell make target will also fetch and build the tool if necessary. You'll need Go to build the spellchecker.

To quickly fix typos, use

make misspell-correction

Issue Triaging

The following diagram shows the initial triaging of new issues.

Issue Triaging

  • Newly created issues are automatically assigned to a spec approver (round-robin). The assignee has 3 business days for the first response.
  • The assignee checks if they are the right person to handle the first response and if not re-assigns to a more appropriate person (typically based on the areas of interest).
  • The assignee makes a decision about the first response. It should be one of the 3 responses:
    • Yes, this is a good issue and we want to work on it.
    • Maybe, this issue needs to be clarified and/or others have to be pulled in before we can make a decision. More information may be requested from the issue author or others.
    • No, this issue should not be accepted. This can happen when the issue is a duplicate, was discussed and rejected in the past, is out of the project scope, etc. The assignee labels the issue "won't do", closes it and provides the reason for closing. The issue author has the choice to appeal the decision, in which case the issue is reopened and the assignee asks other spec approvers to help triage and facilitate the discussion.
    • As a result of triaging one of the 3 labels must be applied to the issue: triaged-accepted, triaged-needmoreinfo, triaged-rejected. Absence of the label indicates that the issue still needs the first response.
  • If the first response is Yes, the assignee decides if they are the right person to work on the issue long-term. If not, they will look for another contributor who can work on the issue and re-assign to them, label the issue as "backlog". If no-one is available to work on the issue the issue is labeled as "help wanted" and unassigned.
  • Any other spec approver can take over the issue before the original assignee's first response if they prefer to drive it themselves. In this case the other spec approver must re-assign the issue to themselves, if necessary first ensuring that no-one else is already working on the issue.

Pull Requests

How to create a PR

Everyone is welcome to contribute to the OpenTelemetry specification via GitHub pull requests (PRs).

To create a new PR, fork the project in GitHub and clone the upstream repo:

git clone https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification.git

Add your fork as a remote:

git remote add fork https://github.com/YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME/opentelemetry-specification.git

Check out a new branch, make modifications and push the branch to your fork:

$ git checkout -b feature
# edit files
$ git commit
$ git push fork feature

Open a pull request against the main opentelemetry-specification repo.

If the PR is not ready for review, please mark it as draft.

For non-trivial changes, please update the CHANGELOG.

Please make sure CLA is signed and CI is clear. We don't expect people to review and comment on a PR that doesn't have CLA signed.

How to get your PR merged

A PR is considered to be ready to merge when:

  • It has received more than two approvals from the code owners (if approvals are from only one company, they won't count).
  • There is no request changes from the code owners.
  • It has been at least two working days since the last modification (except for the trivial updates, such like typo, cosmetic, rebase, etc.). This gives people reasonable time to review.
  • Trivial changes (typos, cosmetic changes, CI improvements, etc.) don't have to wait for two days.
  • The spec maintainers might make situational judgement and put additional requirements (e.g. need more approvals, wait for the next release train, etc.).

Any spec maintainer can merge the PR once it is ready to merge.

If a PR has been stuck (e.g. there are lots of debates and people couldn't agree on each other), the owner should try to get people aligned by:

  • Consolidating the perspectives and putting a summary in the PR. It is recommended to add a link into the PR description, which points to a comment with a summary in the PR conversation.
  • Tagging subdomain experts (by looking at the change history) in the PR asking for suggestion.
  • Reaching out to more people on the CNCF OpenTelemetry Slack channel. If you are new, you can create a CNCF Slack account here.
  • Stepping back to see if it makes sense to narrow down the scope of the PR or split it up.

If none of the above worked and the PR has been stuck for more than 2 weeks, the owner should bring it to the OpenTelemetry Specification SIG meeting.

Releasing

Release Procedure:

  1. Prepare a draft release here. Don't publish it yet.
  2. Run opentelemetry.io workflow against opentelemetry-specification submodule as a smoke-test for docs. Fix broken links, if any.
  3. Create a PR with updated CHANGELOG.md. The CHANGELOG.md must have a heading with the new version number. Ensure that no CHANGELOG entries are missing or ended up in the wrong section (e.g., in the last released version rather than Unreleased).
  4. Once CHANGELOG.md PR is approved and ready to be merged we are ready to make the release.
  5. Add the changelog entries from CHANGELOG.md to the description of the previously created draft release here and publish it.

New release is then auto-discovered by opentelemetry.io pipelines which (via bot-generated PR) will eventually publish new version of the specification.