Maintaining Karma

This document is for people working on Karma. It describes common tasks such as triaging or merging pull requests.

If you are interested in contributing to Karma, you might check out Contributing to Karma.

We use gitter/karma-runner to talk about pull requests and issues, stuff like, “hey this is important, can you look into it...”, “I’m not sure what to do about this issue...”.

Triaging issues #

New issues pop up every day. We need to identify urgent issues (such as “nobody can install karma”), close duplicates, answer questions, etc.

See angular/TRIAGING.md for more info.

An issue or pull request is untriaged (needs to be triaged) when it is not assigned to any milestone.

Merging a pull request #

Please, make sure:

• Travis build is green.
• At least one owner (other than you) approved the PR
  • by commenting “LGTM” or something like that.
  • if it’s just a simple docs change or a typo fix, feel free to skip this step.
• All the commits follow the convention.
  • This is very important, because the auto-release tasks depend on it.
  • Commits are squashed. Each change is a single commit.
    • e.g. if the PR contains two changes such as, fix(web-server): xxx and then style(web-server): missing semicolons; it should be two separate changes
    • e.g. if the first commit is fix(web-server): serve binary files and a second commit is “fix unit tests broken in the previous commit”, you should squash them into a single commit.
  • It’s alright to ask the author of the pull request to fix any of the above.

There are two branches: #

• master is what gets automatically released into the "stable" channel (npm install karma).
• canary is what gets automatically released into the "canary" channel (npm install karma@canary)

If the PR is a bug fix or documentation change that is relevant to the current stable release (branch "master"), merge the PR into master. You can use the “green button” on GitHub.

No new features or breaking changes can go into the master branch.

Features or breaking changes should be merged into "canary" branch. So do bug fixes or documentation fixes that are only related to the canary release.

An easy way to merge a pull request is to use the fetch_pr and merge_pr scripts.

Ownership #

Every project has one or more owners (or “maintainers”), listed in owners field of the package.json. Typically, owners have push permissions.

Being a maintainer of one plugin doesn’t mean you can’t contribute to some other plugins. In fact, you can be a maintainer of multiple projects. The main point is to have people who are familiar with the codebase and therefore can better decide what is a good change or not.

Becoming a maintainer #

If you are interest in becoming a Karma maintainer, start by triaging issues, reviewing pull requests and stop by at gitter/karma-runner. Once we see you are helping, we will give you push permissions. Being a maintainer is not an obligation. You can help when you have time and be less active when you don’t. If you get a new job and get busy, that’s alright.

These are all just recommendations, something we found to be helpful for us to be more efficient. Nothing is set in a stone. If you feel like there is a way to improve this workflow, please send a proposal to karma-devs@googlegroups.com.