Contributing to pg-datahike

Licensing of contributions

pg-datahike is released under the PostgreSQL License — the same license as PostgreSQL itself. Contributions are accepted under that license.

There is no CLA. Instead we use the Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO): sign off each commit to certify that you wrote the patch, or otherwise have the right to submit it under the project's license.

git commit -s -m "your message"

which appends

Signed-off-by: Your Name <your@email>

Use your real name and a reachable address; git config user.name and user.email should already be set to these.

Why permissive, and why no CLA

A PostgreSQL-compatible server should not be harder to build on than PostgreSQL. The PostgreSQL License means anyone can embed, fork, or ship pg-datahike commercially, closed-source, without asking.

Because the inbound license is permissive, we do not need contributors to sign rights away — every patch arrives already licensed for any use, including in commercial products. The trade-off is deliberate and worth stating: without a CLA the project cannot be relicensed later, and the PostgreSQL License carries no express patent grant. Both are accepted consequences of keeping contribution friction at zero.

Note on borrowed code

Do not paste code from EPL-licensed sources — including datahike, konserve, and the rest of the replikativ stack — into pg-datahike's own files. Those files would have to keep their original license, which defeats the point of a uniformly permissive tree. Depending on those libraries is fine; copying their source into this repository is not.

Behavioral references to PostgreSQL are fine and encouraged: cite the relevant src/backend/... file in a comment as a specification, and write an original implementation. Do not transcribe PostgreSQL's C source.

Development

See README.md for architecture and the module map, and doc/ for design notes.

clojure -T:build compile-java   # required before anything loads the server
clojure -M:test                 # unit tests
clojure -M:format               # cljfmt check (CI-equivalent)
clojure -M:ffix                 # cljfmt fix

Integration suites under test/integration/ clone upstream drivers (pgjdbc, asyncpg, node-postgres) and run their conformance tests against pg-datahike; each has its own README.