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Requesting a Change

Paladin is a powerful tool which serves a wide range of use cases. Put yourself in our shoes – with a project of this size, it can be challenging to maintain existing functionality while constantly adding new features at the same time. We highly value every idea or contribution from our community, and we kindly ask you to take the time to read the following guidelines before submitting your change request in our public issue tracker. This will help us better understand the proposed change, and how it will benefit the community.

This guide is our best effort to explain the criteria and reasoning behind our decisions when evaluating change requests and considering them for implementation.

Before creating an issue

Before you invest your time to fill out and submit a change request, we kindly ask you to do some preliminary work by answering some questions to determine if your idea is a good fit and matches the project's philosophy and tone.

Please find answers to the following questions before creating an issue.

It's not a bug, it's a feature

Change requests are intended for suggesting minor adjustments, ideas for new features, or to influence the project's direction and vision. It is important to note that change requests are not intended for reporting bugs, as they're missing essential information for debugging.

If you want to report a bug, please refer to our bug reporting guide instead.

Source of inspiration

If you have seen your idea implemented in similar project, make sure to collect enough information on its implementation before submitting, as this allows us to evaluate potential fit more quickly. Explain what you like and dislike about the implementation.

Benefit for the community

Our Discord server is the best place to connect with our community. When evaluating new ideas, it's essential to seek input from other users and consider alternative viewpoints. This approach helps to implement new features in a way that benefits a large number of users.

Issue template

Now that you have taken the time to do the necessary preliminary work and ensure that your idea meets our requirements, you are invited to create a change request. The following guide will walk you through all necessary steps to help you submit a comprehensive and useful issue:

Title

A good title is short and descriptive. It should be a one-sentence executive summary of the idea, so the potential impact and benefit for the community can be inferred from the title.

Context optional

Before describing your idea, you can provide additional context for us to understand what you are trying to achieve. Explain the circumstances in which you're using Paladin, and what you think might be relevant. Don't write about the change request here.

Why we need this

Some ideas might only benefit specific settings, environments or edge cases. With a little context, change requests can be prioritized more accurately.

Description

Next, provide a detailed and clear description of your idea. Explain why your idea is relevant to Paladin and must be implemented here, and not in one of its dependencies.

  • Explain the what, not the why – don't explain the benefits of your idea here, we're getting there. Focus on describing the proposed change request as precisely as possible.

  • Keep it short and concise – be brief and to the point when describing your idea, there is no need to over-describe it. Maintainers and future users will be grateful for having to read less.

  • One idea at a time – if you have multiple ideas that don't belong together, please open separate change requests for each of those ideas.

  • Stretch goal – if you have a customization or another way to add the proposed change, you can help other users by sharing it here before we maintainers can add it to our code base.

Why we need this

To understand and evaluate your proposed change, we need to have a clear understanding of your idea. By providing a detailed and precise description, you can help save you and us time spent discussing further clarification of your idea in the comments.

Please provide any relevant links to issues, discussions, or documentation sections related to your change request. If you (or someone else) already discussed this idea with the community on our discussion board, please include the link to the discussion as well.

Why we need this

Related links help us gain a comprehensive understanding of your change request by providing additional context. Additionally, linking to previous issues and discussions allows us to quickly evaluate the feedback and input already provided by the community.

Use cases

Explain how your change request would work from a user's perspective – what's the expected impact and why does it not only benefit you, but other users? How many of them? Furthermore, would it potentially break existing functionality?

Why we need this

Understanding the use cases and benefits of an idea is crucial in evaluating its potential impact and usefulness for the project and its users. This information helps us to understand the expected value of the idea and how it aligns with the goals of the project.

Visuals optional

We now have a clear and detailed description of your idea, including information on its potential use cases and relevant links for context. If you have any visuals, such as sketches, screenshots, mockups, or external assets, you may present them in this section.

Tip

You can drag and drop the files here or include links to external assets.

Additionally, if you have seen this change, feature, or improvement used elsewhere, please provide an example by showcasing it and describing how it was implemented and incorporated.

Why we need this

Illustrations and visuals can help us maintainers better understand and envision your idea. Screenshots, sketches, or mockups can create an additional level of detail and clarity that text alone may not be able to convey. Also, seeing how your idea has been implemented in other projects can help us understand its potential impact and feasibility in Paladin, which helps us maintainers evaluate and triage change requests.

Checklist

Thanks for following the change request guide and creating a high-quality change request. This section ensures that you have read this guide and have worked to your best knowledge to provide us with every piece of information to review your idea for Paladin.

We'll take it from here.

Credits

This document is based on Material for MkDocs Requesting a Change.