A naming convention for GitHub pull requests

There’s a clear need of improving GitHub naming conventions for the following sections.

  • Pull Request Naming
  • Branch Naming
  • Commit Message Naming
  • Tag Naming
  • Label Addition

The most problematic area we see is the Pull Request Naming Convention and Labels hence we’d like to come up with guidelines and once agreed by maintainers provide a Template that will help streamline the above areas.

The suggested solution would be creating general guidelines for this naming convention update.

  • Short and descriptive summary
  • Should be capitalized and written in imperative present tense
  • Not end with a period

Consists of three parts:

  • Title: Short informative summary of the pull request

  • [Issue_ID]

  • Description: More detailed explanatory text describing the PR for the reviewer

Suggested Format: Description #[Ticket_ID] Example:

Description:

  • Separated with a blank line from the subject
  • Explain what, why, etc.
  • Max 72 chars
  • Each paragraph capitalized
  • Example and/or Reproduce steps

Labels

Two class of labels have been created and 1 label from each class must be added to all the pull requests. The two classes and the corresponding labels are as follows :-

    • Build/CI
    • Cluster Management
    • Java
    • Observability
    • VReplication
    • VTAdmin
    • vttestserver

  • Type

    • Announcement
    • Bug
    • CI/Build
    • Documentation
    • Enhancement
    • Feature Request
    • Internal Cleanup
    • Performance
    • Question
    • RFC
    • Testing

Additionally, other labels may be added as appropriate.

We’re looking for the community’s feedback on the above suggestions/flow. Thank you for taking the time to read and respond!