Contributing

Licensing: Apache 2.0, clean room

Blockstor is Apache 2.0. Do not copy structure or code from GPL sources, in particular linstor-server and drbd-utils. You may read them to understand behaviour, never to reproduce how they are written.

Hard rules:

• No GPL-licensed spec files in the tree. LINSTOR’s rest_v1_openapi.yaml declares GPLv3, and code generated from it is a derivative work.
• No code generated from a GPL source by any tool.
• No Go dependency under GPL, AGPL, LGPL or SSPL. CI enforces this through license-check.yml, which runs go-licenses check --disallowed_types=forbidden,restricted over ./cmd/.... That is a denylist: it fails on licenses go-licenses classifies as forbidden or restricted, and lets everything else through, so check a new dependency’s license yourself.
• Every Go source file carries an SPDX-License-Identifier: Apache-2.0 header.

Apache-2.0 projects that are safe to study and depend on: golinstor, the authoritative description of the REST wire shape; piraeus-operator; linstor-csi; drbd-reactor; and the public DRBD 9 documentation and man pages.

When in doubt, work clean room: one person reads the GPL source and writes a behavioural spec, and another implements it without seeing the original.

Before you open a pull request

• go test ./... passes and make lint is clean.
• A bug fix comes with a test at the lowest tier that catches it. A bug in the operator CLI also gets a cell in tests/e2e/cli-matrix/.
• A new CLI verb or a change to a wire shape is checked with the parity refresh, and an intended difference from upstream gets a row in docs/cli-parity-known-deltas.md.
• User-facing behaviour is documented on this site, under site/content/en/docs/.
• Commits follow Conventional Commits and are signed off (git commit --signoff).