Proposal: Criteria for community contributions

[bamurtaugh]

[Proposal] Criteria for community contributions

Related to:

• Distributing feature templates #71
• [Features] Supported Architectures/OS #58
• Consider using Issue Forms for collections-index.yml? devcontainers.github.io#244
• https://github.com/orgs/devcontainers/discussions/86

Goal

As our set of community-contributed Features and Templates continues to grow, we should establish a set of criteria so that it's easier for:

• The community to include any and all required info in a contributing PR
• The spec maintainers to review contributions
• Dev container users to select the right resources

Proposal

User contributions

A proposed Feature or Template contribution to our community index should include the following:

• Clear readme and PR description, including:
  • Owner / maintainer, including if they're part of a verified org
  • Usage scenario
  • Any dependencies and pre-reqs (i.e. required OS or platform)
• Fully functional code that is clearly new / distinct from an existing Feature or Template
  • We shouldn't have Features or Templates that clearly repeat functionality defined in existing items in the index

Spec changes

We'll want to consider a few changes into the specification to support this process:

• Pull request templates on GitHub
  • We should consider creating PR templates on GitHub in the Features and Templates repos that list the required information listed above, so that it's easier for contributors to see what they should include
  • Consider using Issue Forms for collections-index.yml? devcontainers.github.io#244 is a great option
• Publisher verification
  • We can consider a publisher verified if they're verified on GitHub
  • We need the ability to surface this on containers.dev and in tooling
• Ability to declare where things work (i.e. OS or platform) [Features] Supported Architectures/OS #58
• Filtering and sorting
  • Related to the above, users should then be able to filter and sort containers.dev and tooling on several factors:
    • Verified publishers
    • Feature or Template usage (could start with surfacing stars the repo has received on GitHub)
    • Where things work
• Private marketplace Distributing feature templates #71
  • In the case a company doesn't want to contribute their resources to our community index, or they don't fit the criteria outlined above, it'd be helpful for supporting tools to be able to allow users to include their own marketplace endpoint

[samruddhikhandale]

Pull request templates on GitHub
> We should consider creating PR templates on GitHub in the Features and Templates repos that list the required information listed above, so that it's easier for contributors to see what they should include

devcontainers/devcontainers.github.io#244 once implemented will be really cool as an alternative to PR templates ✨

[bamurtaugh]

devcontainers/devcontainers.github.io#244 once implemented will be really cool as an alternative to PR templates ✨

Ah excellent call out @samruddhikhandale, thank you so much! I'll link that issue in the proposal too 😄

[qmacro]

LGTM. One question:

Owner / maintainer, including if they're part of a verified org

Can you please clarify what this means (verified org)?

[bamurtaugh]

Can you please clarify what this means (verified org)?

Thank you for reviewing @qmacro! By this, we mean being part of a verified GitHub org: https://docs.github.com/en/organizations/managing-organization-settings/verifying-or-approving-a-domain-for-your-organization. Right now, the dev containers org is verified on GitHub, and we surface a checkmark in UI like the VS Code Dev Containers extension to signify this verification.

Our goal is to help make users feel more confident and informed about where the contributions they're using are coming from, and we think being able to see something comes from a verified org could be a great help.

Please let me know if you have any questions/feedback on this or any other part of the proposal!

[bamurtaugh]

Two relevant PRs part of this proposal:

• Add issue template & automation for community contributions devcontainers.github.io#354
• Add search functionality on collections, Features, Templates devcontainers.github.io#325