We really appreciate your contributions to the project. We are committed to fostering a welcoming community, please see our Code of Conduct, which can be found here:
There are several ways to contribute:
- Raise an issue found via GitHub Issues.
- Open an pull request to:
- Provide a fix.
- Add an enhancement feature.
- Correct, update or add documentation.
Please keep contributions small and independent. We would much rather have multiple pull requests for each thing done rather than have them all in the same one. This will help us review, give feedback and merge in the changes. The normal process to make a change is as follows:
- Fork the repository.
- Make your change and write unit tests, please try to match the existing documentation and coding style.
- Add a news file describing the changes and add it in the
/changes
directory, see the section News Files below. - Write a good commit message.
- Push to your fork.
- Submit a pull request.
We will review the proposed change as soon as we can and, if needed, give feedback. Please bear in mind that the project is complex and covers a large number of use cases. This means we may ask for changes not only to ensure that the proposed change meets our quality criteria, but also to make sure the that the change is generally useful and doesn't impact other uses cases or maintainability.
News files serve a different purpose to commit messages, which are generally written to inform developers of the project. News files will form part of the release notes so should be written to target the consumer of the package.
- At least, one news file should be added for each Merge/Pull request to the directory
/changes
. - The text of the file should be a single line describing the change and/or impact to the user.
- The filename of the news file should take the form
<number>.<extension>
, e.g,20191231.feature
where:- The number is either the issue number or, if no issue exists, the date in the form
YYYYMMDDHHMM
. - The extension should indicate the type of change as described in the following table:
- The number is either the issue number or, if no issue exists, the date in the form
Change Type | Extension | Version Impact |
---|---|---|
Backwards compatibility breakages or significant changes denoting a shift direction. | .major |
Major increment |
New features and enhancements (non breaking). | .feature |
Minor increment |
Bug fixes or corrections (non breaking). | .bugfix |
Patch increment |
Documentation impacting the consumer of the package (not repo documentation, such as this file, for this use .misc ). |
.doc |
N/A |
Deprecation of functionality or interfaces (not actual removal, for this use .major ). |
.removal |
None |
Changes to the repository that do not impact functionality e.g. build scripts change. | .misc |
None |
You can also use the continuous delivery tools to generate those files.
pip install continuous-delivery-scripts
cd-create-news-file --type <change type> "<message>"
We use pre-commit to install and run commit hooks, mirroring the code checks we run in our CI environment.
The pre-commit
tool allows developers to easily install git hook scripts which will run on every git commit
. The
.pre-commit-config.yaml
in our repository sets up commit hooks to run linters. Those checks
must pass in our CI before a PR is merged. Using commit hooks ensures you can't commit code which violates our style
and maintainability requirements.
When merging the pull request we will squash merge the changes, give it a title which provides context to the changes:
<emoji> <Issue-Number> <Change Summary> (#<Pull Request Number>)
An emoji is used to highlight what has occurred in the change. Commonly used emojis can be seen below, but for a full list please see Gitmoji:
Emoji | Topic(s) |
---|---|
✨ | New features or enhancements. |
🐛 | Bug / defect fixes. |
🔒 | Fixing security issues. |
⚡️ | Improving performance. |
♻️ | Refactoring or addressing technical debt. |
💥 | Breaking changes or removing functionality. |
❗️ | Notice of deprecation. |
📝 | Writing or updating documentation. |
👷 | Adding to the CI or build system. |
💚️ | Fixing CI or build system issues. |
🚀 | Releasing or deploying. |
For more on the version number scheme please see the ReadMe.
Thank you