Many changes, including bug fixes and documentation improvements can be implemented and reviewed via the normal commaai/openpilot GitHub pull request workflow.

Some changes though are "substantial", and my thoughts are that these be put through a bit of a design process and produce a consensus among the openpilot community.

The "RFC" (request for comments) process is intended to provide a consistent and controlled path for new features to enter the codebase & ui.

I recommend you follow this process if you intend to make "substantial" changes to openpilot, or its documentation. What constitutes a "substantial" change is evolving based on community norms, but may include the following.

• A new feature that creates new surface area, require significant changes if introduced, and could be included a NEW FEATURE of openpilot.
• The removal of features that already shipped as part of a release.
• The introduction of new idiomatic usage or conventions, even if they do not include code changes to openpilot itself.

Some changes do not require an RFC:

• Rephrasing, reorganizing or refactoring
• Addition or removal of warnings
• Additions that strictly improve objective, numerical quality criteria (speedup, better performance)
• Additions only likely to be noticed by other implementors-of-openpilot, invisible to drivers-of-openpilot.

It's often helpful to get feedback on your concept before diving into the level of design detail required for an RFC. You may open an issue on this repo to start a high-level discussion, with the goal of eventually formulating an RFC pull request with the specific implementation design.

In short, one should first get the RFC merged into the RFC repo as a markdown file. At that point the RFC is open to consideration by the community and may be implemented with the goal of eventual inclusion into openpilot by developers in the community or Comma.ai themselves if they decide they support the proposals.

• Fork the RFC repo http://github.com/jfrux/openpilot-rfcs
• Copy 0000-template.md to text/0000-my-feature.md (where 'my-feature' is descriptive. don't assign an RFC number yet).
• Fill in the RFC. Put care into the details: RFCs that do not present convincing motivation, demonstrate understanding of the impact of the design, or are disingenuous about the drawbacks or alternatives tend to be poorly-received.
• Submit a pull request. As a pull request the RFC will receive design feedback from the larger community, and the author should be prepared to revise it in response.
• Build consensus and integrate feedback. RFCs that have broad support are much more likely to make progress than those that don't receive any comments.
• Eventually, the community will decide whether the RFC is a candidate for inclusion in openpilot and whether to create an official PR.
• An RFC can be modified based upon feedback from the community. Significant modifications may trigger a new final comment period.
• An RFC may be rejected by the community after public discussion has settled and comments have been made summarizing the rationale for rejection. A member of the openpilot community should then close the RFC's associated pull request.
• At any point an RFC maybe accepted and developed by a community developer or designer and it is recommended that you leave a comment on this RFC noting the repository fork / change.

Once an RFC is created then authors should make every attempt to implement it and submit the feature as a pull request to the commaai/openpilot repo.

Furthermore, the fact that a given RFC is created implies nothing about what priority is assigned to its implementation, nor whether anybody is currently working on it.

Modifications to RFC's can be done in followup PR's. We strive to write each RFC in a manner that it will reflect the final design of the feature; but the nature of the process means that we cannot expect every merged RFC to actually reflect what the end result will be at the time of the next major release; therefore we try to keep each RFC document somewhat in sync with the language feature as planned, tracking such changes via followup pull requests to the document.

The author of an RFC is not obligated to implement it. Of course, the RFC author (like any other developer / designer) is welcome to post an implementation for review after the RFC has been merged.

If you are interested in working on the implementation for an RFC, but cannot determine if someone else is already working on it, feel free to ask (e.g. by leaving a comment on the associated issue or via Comma Slack).

Each week someone from the community appointed members that moderate the RFCs repository will attempt to review some set of open RFC pull requests.

We try to make sure that any RFC that is created will be merged weekly. Every merged RFC should ideally have a referenced fork or branch of commaai/openpilot and optionally an existing PR associated with it.

We owe this RFC process to the Rust RFC process