First off, thank you for considering contributing to SYMU. There are different ways to contribute to this project. Contributing start by using the framework and give feedbacks.
As a user, every feedback such as questions, bugs, improvments are very important to progress toward a user friendly framework.
As a developper, such a framework brings great challenges to which you can contribute
- Unit test a multi agents system (multi thread, asynchronous messages)
- Code design
- Code quality
- Code performance
- App to use the framework
As an academic, you can bring use cases, models that we will implement for you. This is very important because the value of this framework will be based on the richness of the library of models it uses.
If you've noticed a bug or have a feature request, [make one][new issue]! It's generally best if you get confirmation of your bug or approval for your feature request this way before starting to code.
If you have a general question about SYMU, If you've noticed a bug or have a feature request, you can [make one][new issue]! Every contibution is done via issues. General questions will feed the FAQs.
The main project is SymuEngine. This is the framework you'll use to build your own application in batch or GUI mode. SymuTools is a set of utilities for SymuEngine. Those two projects come with their test project, mainly unit tests. They are helpful for developers to understand how to use the framework.
The sample projects are interesting to understand what the framework can do. They are divided into models, for example learning and forgetting models. They also come with their test project, which are more integration tests and a guide to use this framework in batch mode. They allow you to discover, understand and configure each model, in this sense it is a good entry point.
If this is something you think you can fix, then [fork SYMU] and create a branch with a descriptive name.
A good branch name would be ISSUENUMBER-FEATURE-YOU-IMPLEMENT
Support your developments in unit testing. Make sure that the existing tests of the SymuTests and SymuToolsTests projects still pass with your modifications.
At this point, you're ready to make your changes! Feel free to ask for help; everyone is a beginner at first 😸
Your patch should follow the same conventions & pass the same code quality checks as the rest of the project. You can install packages Microsoft.CodeAnalysis and Microsoft.CodeQuality to check & fix style issues.
You'll be asked to add a changelog entry following the existing changelog format.
The changelog format is the following:
- One line per PR describing your fix or enhancement.
- Entries end with a dot, followed by "[#ISSUENUMBERnumber] by [@github-username]".
- YYY. [#ISSUENUMBER] by [@lmorisse]
- Entries are added under the "Unreleased" section at the top of the file, under the "Bug Fixes" or "Enhancements" subsection.
- References to github usernames and pull requests use shortcut reference links.
At this point, you should switch back to your master branch and make sure it's up to date with Symu's master branch, then update your feature branch from your local copy of master, and push it!
Finally, go to GitHub and make a Pull Request
If a maintainer asks you to "rebase" your PR, they're saying that a lot of code has changed, and that you need to update your branch so it's easier to merge.
To learn more about rebasing in Git, there are a lot of good resources but here's the suggested workflow:
A PR can only be merged into master by a maintainer if:
- It is passing CI.
- It has been approved by at least two maintainers. If it was a maintainer who opened the PR, only one extra approval is needed.
- It has no requested changes.
- It is up to date with current master.
Any maintainer is allowed to merge a PR if all of these conditions are met.
Maintainers need to do the following to push out a release:
- Make sure all pull requests are in and that changelog is current
- Switch to the master branch and make sure it's up to date.