Apache Airflow is a Community within Apache Software Foundation. As the motto of the Apache Software Foundation states "Community over Code" - people in the community are far more important than their contribution.
This means that communication plays a big role in it, and this chapter is all about it.
In our communication, everyone is expected to follow the ASF Code of Conduct.
We have various channels of communication - starting from the official devlist, comments in the PR, Slack, wiki.
All those channels can be used for different purposes. You can join the channels via links at the Airflow Community page
- The Apache Airflow devlist for:
- official communication
- general issues, asking community for opinion
- discussing proposals
- voting
- The Airflow CWiki for:
- detailed discussions on big proposals (Airflow Improvement Proposals also name AIPs)
- GitHub Pull Requests (PRs) for:
- discussing implementation details of PRs
- not for architectural discussions (use the devlist for that)
- The deprecated JIRA issues for:
IMPORTANT We don't create new issues on JIRA anymore. The reason we still look at JIRA issues is that there are valuable tickets inside of it. However, each new PR should be created on GitHub issues as stated in Contribution Workflow Example
- checking out old but still valuable issues that are not on GitHub yet
- mentioning the JIRA issue number in the title of the related PR you would like to open on GitHub
- The Apache Airflow Slack for:
- ad-hoc questions related to development and asking for review (#contributors channel)
- asking for help with first contribution PRs (#new-contributors channel)
- troubleshooting (#user-troubleshooting channel)
- using Breeze (#airflow-breeze channel)
- improving and maintaining documentation (#documentation channel)
- group talks (including SIG - special interest groups) (#sig-* channels)
- notifications (#announcements channel)
- random queries (#random channel)
- regional announcements (#users-* channels)
- occasional discussions (wherever appropriate including group and 1-1 discussions)
Please exercise caution against posting same questions across multiple channels. Doing so not only prevents redundancy but also promotes more efficient and effective communication for everyone involved.
The devlist is the most important and official communication channel. Often at Apache project you can hear "if it is not in the devlist - it did not happen". If you discuss and agree with someone from the community on something important for the community (including if it is with maintainer or PMC member) the discussion must be captured and re-shared on devlist in order to give other members of the community to participate in it.
- We are using certain prefixes for email subjects for different purposes. Start your email with one of those:
[DISCUSS]- if you want to discuss something but you have no concrete proposal yet[PROPOSAL]- if usually after "[DISCUSS]" thread discussion you want to propose something and see what other members of the community think about it.[AIP-NN]- if the mail is about one of the Airflow Improvement Proposals[VOTE]- if you would like to start voting on a proposal discussed before in a "[PROPOSAL]" thread[ANNOUNCE]- only used by PMC members to announce important things to the community such as releases or big changes in the project
Voting is governed by the rules described in Voting
We are all devoting our time for community as individuals who except for being active in Apache Airflow have families, daily jobs, right for vacation. Sometimes we are in different timezones or simply are busy with day-to-day duties that our response time might be delayed. For us it's crucial to remember to respect each other in the project with no formal structure. There are no managers, departments, most of us are autonomous in our opinions, decisions. All of it makes Apache Airflow community a great space for open discussion and mutual respect for various opinions.
Disagreements are expected, discussions might include strong opinions and contradicting statements. Sometimes you might get two maintainers asking you to do things differently. This all happened in the past and will continue to happen. As a community we have some mechanisms to facilitate discussion and come to a consensus, conclusions or we end up voting to make important decisions. It is important that these decisions are not treated as personal wins or losses. At the end it's the community that we all care about and what's good for community, should be accepted even if you have a different opinion. There is a nice motto that you should follow in case you disagree with community decision "Disagree but engage". Even if you do not agree with a community decision, you should follow it and embrace (but you are free to express your opinion that you don't agree with it).
As a community - we have high requirements for code quality. This is mainly because we are a distributed and loosely organized team. We have both - contributors that commit one commit only, and people who add more commits. It happens that some people assume informal "stewardship" over parts of code for some time - but at any time we should make sure that the code can be taken over by others, without excessive communication. Setting high requirements for the code (fairly strict code review, static code checks, requirements of automated tests, pre-commit checks) is the best way to achieve that - by only accepting good quality code. Thanks to full test coverage we can make sure that we will be able to work with the code in the future. So do not be surprised if you are asked to add more tests or make the code cleaner - this is for the sake of maintainability.
Here are a few rules that are important to keep in mind when you enter our community:
- Do not be afraid to ask questions
- The communication is asynchronous - do not expect immediate answers, ping others on slack (#contributors channel) if blocked
- There is a #newbie-questions channel in slack as a safe place to ask questions
- You can ask one of the maintainers to be a mentor for you, maintainers can guide you within the community
- You can apply to more structured Apache Mentoring Programme
- It's your responsibility as an author to take your PR from start-to-end including leading communication in the PR
- It's your responsibility as an author to ping maintainers to review your PR - be mildly annoying sometimes, it's OK to be slightly annoying with your change - it is also a sign for maintainers that you care
- Be considerate to the high code quality/test coverage requirements for Apache Airflow
- If in doubt - ask the community for their opinion or propose to vote at the devlist
- Discussions should concern subject matters - judge or criticize the merit but never criticize people
- It's OK to express your own emotions while communicating - it helps other people to understand you
- Be considerate for feelings of others. Tell about how you feel not what you think of others
If you want to quick start your contribution, you can follow with Contributors Quick Start