1 ## Important: Feature freeze / release candidate phase for Betaflight 4.3
3 From 29 November 2021 until the release of Betaflight 4.3.0 (scheduled for early 2022), the project is in a 'feature freeze / release candidate' phase. This means:
5 1. Pull requests can still be submitted as normal. Comments / discussions will probably be slower than normal due to shifted priorities;
7 2. If your pull request is a fix for an existing bug, or an update for a single target that has a low risk of side effect for other targets, it will be reviewed. It may be accepted merged into `master` for the 4.3 release, or held over to 4.4;
9 3. All other pull requests will be scheduled for 4.4, and discussed / reviewed / merged into `master` after 4.30 has been released. Please keep in mind that this potentially means that you will have to rebase your changes if they are broken by bugfixes made for 4.3.
13 ## Important considerations when opening a pull request:
15 1. Make sure you do not make the changes you want to open a pull request for on the `master` branch of your fork, or open the pull request from the `master` branch of your fork. Some of our integrations will fail if you do this, resulting in your pull request not being accepted. If this is your first pull request, it is probably a good idea to first read up on how opening pull requests work (https://opensource.com/article/19/7/create-pull-request-github is a good introduction);
17 2. Pull requests will only be accepted if they are opened against the `master` branch of our repository. Pull requests opened against other branches without prior consent from the maintainers will be closed;
19 3. Please follow the coding style guidelines: https://github.com/betaflight/betaflight/blob/master/docs/development/CodingStyle.md
21 4. Keep your pull requests as small and concise as possible. One pull request should only ever add / update one feature. If the change that you are proposing has a wider scope, consider splitting it over multiple pull requests. In particular, pull requests that combine changes to features and one or more new targets are not acceptable.
23 5. Ideally, a pull request should contain only one commit, with a descriptive message. If your changes use more than one commit, rebase / squash them into one commit before submitting a pull request. If you need to amend your pull request, make sure that the additional commit has a descriptive message, or - even better - use `git commit --amend` to amend your original commit.
25 6. All pull requests are reviewed. Be ready to receive constructive criticism, and to learn and improve your coding style. Also, be ready to clarify anything that isn't already sufficiently explained in the code and text of the pull request, and to defend your ideas.
27 7. If your pull request is for a new target or an update to an existing target, please be aware that all targets have to be submitted as Unified Target configurations if a Unified Target for the MCU type is available. Read and follow [these instructions](https://github.com/betaflight/betaflight/blob/master/docs/TargetMaintenance/CreatingAUnifiedTarget.md).
29 8. We use continuous integration (CI) with [Azure Pipelines](https://dev.azure.com/Betaflight/Betaflight%20Nightlies/_build) to build all targets and run the test suite for every pull request. Pull requests that fail any of the builds or fail tests will most likely not be reviewed before they are fixed to build successfully and pass the tests. In order to get a quick idea if there are things that need fixing **before** opening a pull request or pushing an update into an existing pull request, run `make pre-push` to run a representative subset of the CI build. _Note: This is not an exhaustive test (which will take hours to run on any desktop type system), so even if this passes the CI build might still fail._
31 9. If your pull request is a fix for one or more issues that are open in GitHub, add a comment to your pull request, and add the issue numbers of the issues that are fixed in the form `Fixes #<issue number>`. This will cause the issues to be closed when the pull request is merged;
33 10. If your pull request contains a change that can be tested by other users, please build a set of test firmware files for all Unified Targets and attach them to the pull request. The required firmware files can be built in zipped form ready for upload to GitHub with `make unified_zip`. When attaching test firmware files, you can point users to this video for instructions on how to install the test firmware: https://youtu.be/I1uN9CN30gw
35 11. Remove this Text :).