Compatibility with the app ecosystem

The Nextcloud app ecosystem consists of hundreds of apps and app maintainers.

The development process may require changes that affect apps in this ecosystem. These changes may either be a change in standards or best practises, yet in more extreme cases the changes may also be breaking apps.

While developers are expected to aim for limiting the number of changes that break apps, this cannot always be avoided or is not always reasonable to do to maintain an up-to-date technology stack.

Informing app developers about any change that affect them is therefore key to a thriving ecosystem. This page describes the three procedures to document changes that are relevant to app developers.

Documentation procedures of changes that affect app developers

There are three procedures in place to facilitate communication to app developers about changes that affect them:

  1. The definition of Done of a pull request includes documentation.

This means the development of your pull request cannot be considered done if you introduced changes (additions, removals or modifications) that affect app developers that you did not document.

  1. A change that affects app developers, has to be reported and documented by the author of the pull request in the App Upgrade guide section.

The requirements for this documentation are:

  • It should be written so that app developers understand how to work around the change for their app in a tutorial format

  • The steps should be explicitly written, so the documentation shall not rely upon links to external resources for the steps. While it is encouraged to add an external links as additional reference, it is a hard requirement that the documentation is readable and actionable without browsing to this link.

  • The change author’s name should be added to the section so readers can reach out to the author if they have questions or if something is unclear.

  • Timeline: the documentation is required to be handed in when finalizing the pull request and should be merged timely close to the actual change.

Other documentation requirements

A change that affects administrators who upgrade their Nextcloud should be documented in the release notes section of the admin documentation of that release.