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zkcrypto RFCs - RFC Book

The "RFC" (request for comments) process is intended to provide a consistent and controlled path for changes to zkcrypto crates (such as new features) so that all stakeholders can be confident about their direction.

Many changes, including bug fixes and documentation improvements can be implemented and reviewed via the normal GitHub pull request workflow.

Some changes though are "substantial", and we ask that these be put through a bit of a design process and produce a consensus among the zkcrypto community and the crate maintainers.

Table of Contents

Crates in scope

The RFC process applies to the following Rust crates:

To add or remove a crate from this list, a PR must be opened by a maintainer of the crate (someone with the publish bit for the crate on crates.io). The set of relevant maintainers of a crate in this list (and changes to the set) must be made known to the maintainers of this RFC repository.

When you need to follow this process

You need to follow this process if you intend to make "substantial" changes to one of the crates listed above, or the RFC process itself. What constitutes a "substantial" change is evolving based on community norms and varies depending on what part of the ecosystem you are proposing to change, but may include the following:

Some changes do not require an RFC:

If you submit a pull request to implement a new feature without going through the RFC process, it may be closed with a polite request to submit an RFC first.

Before creating an RFC

A hastily-proposed RFC can hurt its chances of acceptance. Low quality proposals, proposals for previously-rejected features, or those that don't fit into the near-term roadmap, may be quickly rejected, which can be demotivating for the unprepared contributor. Laying some groundwork ahead of the RFC can make the process smoother.

Although there is no single way to prepare for submitting an RFC, it is generally a good idea to pursue feedback from other zkcrypto ecosystem developers beforehand, to ascertain that the RFC may be desirable; having a consistent impact on the zkcrypto ecosystem requires concerted effort toward consensus-building.

The most common preparations for writing and submitting an RFC include discussing the topic on our developer discussion forum, and occasionally posting "pre-RFCs" on the developer forum. Issues filed on this repo should not be used for pre-RFC content; they should generally either be about in-progress RFCs with open PRs, tracking implementation of accepted RFCs, or bugs in accepted RFCs.

As a rule of thumb, receiving encouraging feedback from long-standing zkcrypto ecosystem developers, and particularly the relevant crate maintainers, is a good indication that the RFC is worth pursuing.

What the process is

In short, to get a major feature added to the zkcrypto crates, one must first get the RFC merged into the RFC repository as a Markdown file. At that point the RFC is "active" and may be implemented with the goal of eventual inclusion into the relevant crates.

The RFC life-cycle

Once an RFC becomes "active" then authors may implement it and submit the feature as pull requests to the relevant crate repositories. Being "active" is not a rubber stamp, and in particular still does not mean the feature will ultimately be merged; it does mean that in principle all the major stakeholders have agreed to the feature and are amenable to merging it.

Furthermore, the fact that a given RFC has been accepted and is "active" implies nothing about what priority is assigned to its implementation, nor does it imply anything about whether a zkcrypto ecosystem developer has been assigned the task of implementing the feature. While it is not necessary that the author of the RFC also write the implementation, it is by far the most effective way to see an RFC through to completion: authors should not expect that other project developers will take on responsibility for implementing their accepted feature.

Modifications to "active" RFCs can be done in follow-up pull requests. We strive to write each RFC in a manner that it will reflect the final design of the feature; but the nature of the process means that we cannot expect every merged RFC to actually reflect what the end result will be at the time of the next crate releases.

In general, once accepted, RFCs should not be substantially changed. Only very minor changes should be submitted as amendments. More substantial changes should be new RFCs, with a note added to the original RFC. Exactly what counts as a "very minor change" is up to the relevant crate maintainers to decide.

Reviewing RFCs

While the RFC pull request is up, the relevant crate maintainers may schedule meetings with the author and/or relevant stakeholders to discuss the issues in greater detail. A summary from the meeting will be posted back to the RFC pull request.

The relevant crate maintainers make final decisions about RFCs after the benefits and drawbacks are well understood. These decisions can be made at any time, but the relevant crate maintainers should regularly issue decisions. When a decision is made, the RFC pull request will either be merged or closed. In either case, if the reasoning is not clear from the discussion in thread, the relevant crate maintainers will add a comment describing the rationale for the decision.

Implementing an RFC

Some accepted RFCs represent vital features that need to be implemented right away. Other accepted RFCs can represent features that can wait until some arbitrary developer feels like doing the work. Every accepted RFC has an associated issue in this repository tracking its implementation.

The author of an RFC is not obligated to implement it. Of course, the RFC author (like any other developer) is welcome to post an implementation for review after the RFC has been accepted.

If you are interested in working on the implementation for an "active" RFC, but cannot determine if someone else is already working on it, feel free to ask (e.g. by leaving a comment on the associated issue).

Reviewing and merging RFC implementations

All implementations of RFCs need to go through a code review process that:

In general, a lead reviewer - preferably from a different community entity to the lead implementer - will spearhead the review process. Depending on the kind of RFC and/or the code it affects, additional reviewers may be required. For instance, RFCs that affect consensus code (e.g. that would change ZKP circuits or the validity of objects within some network) generally will require three reviews on their implementations.

The final decision for merging an RFC implementation is made by the relevant crate maintainers. They should ensure that the implementation has received sufficient review to meet their software standards, and request additional reviewers if necessary.

RFC Postponement

Some RFC pull requests are tagged with the "postponed" label when they are closed (as part of the rejection process). An RFC closed with "postponed" is marked as such because we want neither to think about evaluating the proposal nor about implementing the described feature until some time in the future, and we believe that we can afford to wait until then to do so. Postponed pull requests may be re-opened when the time is right. We don't have any formal process for that, you should ask people involved in the RFC and/or the crate maintainers.

Usually an RFC pull request marked as "postponed" has already passed an informal first round of evaluation, namely the round of "do we think we would ever possibly consider making this change, as outlined in the RFC pull request, or some semi-obvious variation of it." (When the answer to the latter question is "no", then the appropriate response is to close the RFC, not postpone it.)

Help this is all too informal!

The process is intended to be as lightweight as reasonable for the present circumstances. We are trying to let the process be driven by consensus and community norms, not impose more structure than necessary.

License

This repository is licensed under either of:

at your option.

Contributions

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.