Development Process

The specification is curated by the editor in chief (currently Matthew Woehlke) and is maintained in a github repository.

Community Involvement

Development of the specification is intended to be an open process. Contributions are welcome from anyone. Problems or feature requests should be filed against the GitHub project.

Much activity and discussion takes place on GitHub, and we encourage use of Issues and Discussions as a primary communication channel. Some members of the community are active in the #ecosystem_evolution channel of CppLang’s Slack. We can also be reached via our mailing list.

In addition, the ecosystem evolution group typically has at least one monthly video-conference call. While not strictly limited to CPS discussion, matters regarding the specification are sometimes discussed there. Additional, more CPS-focused meetings may also occur. See the mailing list for details.

Contributing

Pull requests are welcome, but please be aware that changes which have not been previously discussed may not be desirable, and may be rejected. At a minimum, if you submit a pull request that has not been previously discussed, it is likely that you will be asked to make changes before your proposal is accepted.

Source Presentation

When editing the documentation, please keep in mind that whitespace, and line breaks in particular, are not meaningful to the generated HTML. Accordingly, it is preferred to use these in a way that aims to reduce diff churn if and when the text is subsequently revised. Therefore, do not try to use all available space or slavishly wrap at a particular column. Rather, keep lines shorter, try to break at “natural” boundaries, and always break after a sentence. As a semi-hard limit, reST text should avoid exceeding 79 characters on a line; however, “properly” broken lines should rarely approach that limit.

Consider also Semantic Line Breaks for more details. While those guidelines are not precisely followed here, there is significant overlap, especially in rationale. (Here, we tend to add or omit breaks in a way that keeps line length somewhat consistent within a paragraph. However, the placement of breaks should still roughly follow SLB guidance.)

Commits

Commit messages shall consist of a one-line summary, a blank line, and a longer description. Summaries should ideally be 50 characters or less, should start with a capital letter when possible, should generally omit trailing punctuation, and should use imperative, present tense. Descriptions shall be wrapped at 72 characters except in cases where this is not possible (e.g. very long hyperlinks).

Commits should be self-contained and complete, and ideally each distinct change should be a separate commit. “Fixup” commits should be avoided whenever possible, and especially should not appear in a branch when fixing something earlier in the branch. (The maintainers can and will squash pull requests if needed, but be aware that “dirty” history in a pull request makes for additional work all around.)

Following a consistent style for commit messages helps ensure that commit messages are useful and makes reading the history more pleasant. Producing “clean” history also makes it easier to look back and understand change over time, as changes are presented in logical units with as little noise and clutter as possible.