ARSnova needs you! If you are interested in helping, here is a short guide.
- First, fork and clone our repository.
- Create a topic branch.
- Make your changes. Be sure to provide clean commits and to write expressive commit messages.
- Check your style: run
grunt jscs. - Stay up to date with our repository: Rebase to the latest revision of our master branch using
git rebase. - Push the changes to your topic branch.
- Finally, submit a pull request.
If you don't feel like writing code, you could also update the documentation. And if you find any bugs, feel free to open a new issue.
To get your pull request accepted faster, you should follow our review process before submitting your request. Here is our list of do's and dont's.
This is a no-brainer. Keep your branches up to date so that merges will never end up conflicting. Always test-merge your branches before submitting your pull requests. Ideally, your branches are fast-forwardable, but this is not a requirement.
Committing trailing white-spaces makes your pull request look sloppy. Most editors have a setting that remove trailing white-spaces, which you should activate. You can use git diff to review changes since it highlights erroneous white-spaces.
In addition, do not accidentally remove white-spaces of unrelated lines.
Use git add -p to selectively add changes. Skip those that have nothing to do with the commit you are preparing. Every commit should precisely contain only those changes that are important for the feature you are developing or the bug you are fixing.
In the screenshot above, the license header was accidentally changed, presumably by some editor misconfiguration. Reviewing your changes before committing allows you to spot such mistakes.
Is every file present that has seen some changes? Are there any files that appear in the list even if they were not changed? As mentioned previously, only necessary changes should appear in a commit. Review your changes using git diff --stat.
Addtionally, watch out for mode changes using git diff --summary. A file's mode should not be changed without a reason. As a default, all files should have mode 644:
Sadly, some editors still do not have UTF-8 as their default setting. Using the wrong encoding will destroy non-ASCII characters like french quotation marks or umlauts.
It all comes down to
- reviewing your own changes,
- keeping your commits clean and focused,
- and always staying up to date.
If you keep these things in mind, your pull requests will be accepted much faster. Happy coding!