CONTRIBUTING.md

Welcome

We're so glad you're thinking about contributing to this open source project! If you're unsure or afraid of anything, just ask or submit the issue or pull request anyway. The worst that can happen is that you'll be politely asked to change something. We appreciate any sort of contribution, and don't want a wall of rules to get in the way of that.

Before contributing, we encourage you to read our CONTRIBUTING policy (you are here), our LICENSE, and our README, all of which should be in this repository.

Issues

If you want to report a bug or request a new feature, the most direct method is to create an issue in this repository. We recommend that you first search through existing issues (both open and closed) to check if your particular issue has already been reported. If it has then you might want to add a comment to the existing issue. If it hasn't then feel free to create a new one.

Pull requests

If you choose to submit a pull request, you will notice that our continuous integration (CI) system runs a fairly extensive set of linters and syntax checkers. Your pull request may fail these checks, and that's OK. If you want you can stop there and wait for us to make the necessary corrections to ensure your code passes the CI checks.

If you want to make the changes yourself, or if you want to become a regular contributor, then you will want to set up pre-commit on your local machine. Once you do that, the CI checks will run locally before you even write your commit message. This speeds up your development cycle considerably.

Good pull requests - patches, improvements, new features - are a fantastic help. They should remain focused in scope and avoid containing unrelated commits.

Please ask first before embarking on any significant pull request (e.g. implementing features, refactoring code), otherwise you risk spending a lot of time working on something that the developers might not want to merge into the project.

Please adhere to the coding conventions used throughout the project (indentation, comments, etc.).

Adhering to the following this process is the best way to get your work merged:

1. Fork the repo, clone your fork, and configure the remotes:

   # Clone your fork of the repo into the current directory
   git clone https://github.com/<your-username>/<repo-name>
   # Navigate to the newly cloned directory
   cd <repo-name>
   # Assign the original repo to a remote called "upstream"
   git remote add upstream https://github.com/<upsteam-owner>/<repo-name>

2. If you cloned a while ago, get the latest changes from upstream:

   git checkout <dev-branch>
   git pull upstream <dev-branch>

3. Create a new topic branch (off the main project development branch) to contain your feature, change, or fix:

   git checkout -b <topic-branch-name>

4. Commit your changes in logical chunks. Please adhere to these git commit message guidelines or your code is unlikely be merged into the main project. Use Git's interactive rebase feature to tidy up your commits before making them public.

5. Locally merge (or rebase) the upstream development branch into your topic branch:

   git pull [--rebase] upstream <dev-branch>

6. Push your topic branch up to your fork:

   git push origin <topic-branch-name>

7. Open a Pull Request with a clear title and description.