This document gives some information about how to contribute to the odML project.
If you want to contribute to the project please first create a fork of the repository on GitHub. When you are done with implementing a new feature or with fixing a bug, please send us a pull request.
If you contribute to the project regularly, it would be very much appreciated if you would stick to the following development workflow:
Select an issue from the issue tracker that you want to work on and assign the issue to your account. If the issue is about a relatively complex matter or requires larger API changes the description of the issue or its respective discussion should contain a brief concept about how the solution will look like.
During the implementation of the feature or bug-fix add your changes in small atomic commits. Commit messages should be short but expressive. The first line of the message should not exceed 50 characters and the 2nd line should be empty. If you want to add further text you can do so from the 3rd line on without limitations. If possible reference fixed issues in the commit message (e.g. "fixes #101").
When done with the implementation, compile and test the code. If your work includes a new function or class please write a small unit test for it.
Send us a pull request with your changes. The pull request message should explain the changes and reference the issue addressed by your code. Your pull request will be reviewed by one of our team members. Pull requests should never be merged by the author of the contribution, but by another team member. Merge conflicts or errors reported by travis should be resolved by the original author before the request is merged.
Please see the corresponding Google Summer of Code file if you are interested in contributing as part of the GSoC programme.
Please try to avoid duplicates of issues. If you encounter duplicated issues, please close all of them except one, reference the closed issues in the one that is left open and add missing information from the closed issues (if necessary) to the remaining issue.
Assign meaningful tags to newly crated issues and if possible assign them to milestones.
Every code (even small contributions from core developers) should be added to the project via pull requests. Before reviewing a pull request it should pass all builds and tests on travis-ci. Each pull request that passes all builds and tests should be reviewed by at least one of the core developers. If a contribution is rather complex or leads to significant API changes, the respective pull request should be reviewed by two other developers. In such cases the first reviewer or the contributor should request a second review in a comment.
Unit test can be found in the test sub directory. Currently, the test coverage is a bit low but we are working on improving it.
Provide a unit test for every class, method or function.
Please make sure that all tests pass before merging/sending pull requests.
Always keep your code PEP8 compliant.
