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CONTRIBUTING.md

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Contributor guidelines

Contributing code to this project is intended to be light weight and intuitive to users familiar with GitHub to actively encourage contributions, but a process is documented and should be followed to prevent chaos, confusion and despair.

The mechanics of contributing code

Firstly, in order to contribute code to this project, a contributor must have a valid and current GitHub account available to use. Given an account,

  • The potential contributor forks this project into his/her account following the traditional forking model native to GitHub
  • After forking, the contributor clones their repository locally on their machine
  • Code is developed and checked into the contributor's repository. These commits are eventually pushed upstream to their GitHub repository
  • The contributor then issues a pull-request against the develop branch of this repository, which is the git flow workflow which is well suited for working with GitHub
    • A git extension has been developed to ease the use of the 'git flow' methodology, but requires manual installation by the user. Refer to the projects wiki

At this point, the repository maintainers will be notified by GitHub that a 'pull request' exists pending against their repository. A code review should be completed within a few days, depending on the scope of submitted code, and the code will either be accepted, rejected or commented on for extra feedback.

Code submission guidelines

We want to ensure that the project code base maintains a level of quality over time, such that future contributors find it as easy to jump into the code as hopefully it is today. As such, pull requests should

  • remember that clMath is a project licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. If you are not already familiar, please review the license before issuing a pull request. We intend this project to be open to external contributors, and encourage developers to contribute code back that they believe will provide value to the overall community. We will interpret an explicit 'pull request' back to this repository as an implicit acknowledgement from the contributor that they wish to share the code with the community under the terms of the Apache license v2.0.
  • follow the code style guidelines of the project as posted to the project wiki. Unfortunately, there was no unifying code guidelines defined between the BLAS & FFT projects, but code submissions should not mix styles within an individual file. We have since defined and posted a code style guideline for the projects and we expect the code to slowly transition to the new guidelines over time
    • separate check-ins that modify a files style from the ones that add/change/delete code.
  • target the develop branch in the repository
  • ensure that the code properly builds
  • cannot break existing test cases
    • we encourage contributors to run the test-short suite of tests on their end before the pull-request
      • if possible, upload the test results associated with the pull request to a personal gist repository and insert a link to the test results in the pull request so that collaborators can browse the results
      • if no test results are provided with the pull request, official collaborators will run the test suite on their test machines against the patch before we will accept the pull-request
        • if we detect failing test cases, we will request that the code associated with the pull request be fixed before the pull request will be merged
    • if new functionality is introduced with the pull request, sufficient test cases should be added to verify the new functionality is correct
      • new tests should integrate with the existing googletest framework located in the src/tests directory of the repo
      • if the collaborators feel the new tests do not provide sufficient coverage, feedback on the pull request will be left with suggestions on how to improve the tests before the pull request will be merged

Pull requests will be reviewed by the set of collaborators that are assigned for the repository. Pull requests may be accepted, declined or a conversation may start on the pull request thread with feedback. If the pull request is trivial and all the submission guidelines defined above are honored, the pull request may be accepted without delay. If the pull request is good, but the guidelines defined above are not followed, the collaborators may leave feedback on the pull request and engage in a conversation with the contributor with what they can do to improve the pull request. At any time, collaborators may decline a pull request if they decide the contribution is not appropriate for the project, or the feedback from reviewers on a pull request is not being addressed in an appropriate amount of time.

Is it possible to become an official collaborator of the repository?

Yes, we hope to promote trusted members of the community, who have proven themselves to be competent and request to take on the extra responsibility to be official collaborators of the project. When an individual requests to be an official collaborator, current project collaborators will browse through the history of the requester's prior pull requests and take a vote amongst themselves if the requester should be promoted to collaborator. These individuals will then have the right to approve/decline pull requests and help shape the path that the project goes. It is worth noting, that on GitHub everybody has read-only access to the source and that everybody has the ability to issue a pull request to contribute to the project. The benefit of being a repository collaborator allows you to be able to manage other peoples pull requests.