Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
224 lines (166 loc) · 9.55 KB

CONTRIBUTING.md

File metadata and controls

224 lines (166 loc) · 9.55 KB
Raw

Contributing to Mersad Cryptography Library

Welcome! Azadeh Afzar - Mersad Cryptography Library (AA-MCL) is a hobby project that aims to implement a wide range of cryptography and cryptanalysis algorithms. If you're trying AA-MCL, your experience and what you can contribute are important to the project's success.

Getting started, building, and testing

If you haven't already, take a look at the project's README.md file.

Git repository

All project's development and discussion takes place on GitLab, there is also a mirror on GitHub.

For contributing to this project, first login into your GitLab account and fork this repository. After forking this repo, clone it into your local machine and create a new branch from master branch with a descriptive name that describes your new feature or fix #issue-code when you are fixing an issue. This part is important! we do not accept MRs from master branch.

After doing your changes, commit and push your new branch to your forked repository on GitLab and then ask for a Merge Request to master branch of this repository.

Environment and dependency

For the development we use pipenv as virtual environment and dependency manager, all dependencies are listed in a pipfile.

You can install pipenv with:

pip install --user pipenv

Then got to the cloned AA-MCL directory and create a pipenv virtual environment:

pipenv --three

Install all dependencies including development dependencies:

pipenve install --dev

if you ran into locking errors, this will fix it:

pipenve install --dev --skip-lock

Discussion

If you've run into behavior in Mersad Cryptography Library you don't understand, or you're having trouble working out a good way to apply it to your code, or you've found a bug or would like a feature it doesn't have, we want to hear from you!

Our main forum for discussion is the project's GitLab issue tracker. This is the right place to start a discussion of any of the above or most any other topic concerning the project.

Code of Conduct

Everyone participating in the AA-MCL community, and in particular in our issue tracker, pull requests, and IRC channel, is expected to treat other people with respect and more generally to follow the guidelines articulated in the Mersad Cryptography Library Code of Conduct.

First Time Contributors

Mersad Cryptography Library appreciates your contribution! If you are interested in helping improve AA-MCL, there are several ways to get started:

  • Find bugs and open issues on GitLab! this is almost one of the best ways to contribute.
  • Work on documentation issues.
  • Write tests for existing modules.
  • Add new cryptography or cryptanalysis algorithms to the project.

Submitting Changes

Even more excellent than a good bug report is a fix for a bug, or the implementation of a much-needed new feature. (*) We'd love to have your contributions.

(*) If your new feature will be a lot of work, we recommend talking to us early -- see below.

We use the usual GitLab merge-request flow, which may be familiar to you if you've contributed to other projects on GitLab.

Anyone interested in Mersad Cryptography Library may review your code. One of the AA-MCL core developers will merge your merge request when they think it's ready. For every merge request, we aim to promptly either merge it or say why it's not yet ready; if you go a few days without a reply, please feel free to ping the thread by adding a new comment.

For a list of AA-MCL core developers, see the file CREDITS.

Preparing Changes

Before you begin: if your change will be a significant amount of work to write, we highly recommend starting by opening an issue laying out what you want to do. That lets a conversation happen early in case other contributors disagree with what you'd like to do or have ideas that will help you do it.

The best pull requests are focused, clearly describe what they're for and why they're correct, and contain tests for whatever changes they make to the code's behavior. As a bonus these are easiest for someone to review, which helps your merge request get merged quickly! Standard advice about good merge requests for open-source projects applies; we have [our own writeup][good merge request] of this advice. (adapted from mypy guidelines)

See also our coding conventions -- which consist mainly of a reference to PEP 8 -- for the code you put in the merge request.

Also, do not squash your commits after you have submitted a merge request, as this erases context during review. We will squash commits when the merge request is merged.

You may also find other pages in the AA-MCL wiki helpful in developing your change.

Core developer guidelines

Core developers should follow these rules when processing merge requests:

  • Always wait for tests to pass before merging MRs.
  • Use "Squash and merge" to merge MRs.
  • Delete branches for merged MRs (by core devs pushing to the main repo).
  • Edit the final commit message before merging to conform to the following style (we wish to have a clean git log output):

    • all commit messages should start with one of these keywords in the subject:

      • init: for initial commits.
      • add: for adding new feature.
      • fix: for fixing an issue.
      • modify: for changing existing code for optimization/readability etc.
      • update: for changing doc files or comments.
      • remove: for deleting code or file.
      • build: for updating MakeFiles, etc for build process.
      • style: for fixing indentation or line breaks, etc.
      • document: for adding new documentation.
      • version: for releasing version tags.
      • ci: for DevOps jobs, like editing .travis.yml file.
      • [skip ci]: use this keyword when you change docs to avoid running CI/CD jobs.

    • When merging a multi-commit MR make sure that the commit message doesn't contain the local history from the committer and the review history from the MR. Edit the message to only describe the end state of the MR.

    • Make sure there is a single newline at the end of the commit message. This way there is a single empty line between commits in git log output.

    • Split lines as needed so that the maximum line length of the commit message is under 80 characters, including the subject line.

    • Do not capitalize the subject and each paragraph.

    • Make sure that the subject of the commit message has no trailing dot.

    • If the MR fixes an issue, make sure something like "issue #xxx." occurs in the body of the message and not in the subject (e.g. fix: issue #32).

    • Use Markdown for formatting.

Issue-tracker conventions

We aim to reply to all new issues promptly. We'll assign a milestone to help us track which issues we intend to get to when, and may apply labels to carry some other information. Here's what our milestones and labels mean.

Task priority and sizing

We use GitLab "labels" (see our list) to roughly order what we want to do soon and less soon. There's two dimensions taken into account: priority (does it matter to our users) and size (how long will it take to complete).

Bugs that aren't a huge deal but do matter to users and don't seem like a lot of work to fix generally will be dealt with sooner; things that will take longer may go further out.

We are trying to keep the backlog at a manageable size, an issue that is unlikely to be acted upon in foreseeable future is going to be respectfully closed. This doesn't mean the issue is not important, but rather reflects the limits of the team.

The question label is for issue threads where a user is asking a question but it isn't yet clear that it represents something to actually change. We use the issue tracker as the preferred venue for such questions, even when they aren't literally issues, to keep down the number of distinct discussion venues anyone needs to track. These might evolve into a bug or feature request.

Issues without a priority or size haven't been triaged. We aim to triage all new issues promptly, but there are some issues from previous years that we haven't yet re-reviewed since adopting these conventions.

Other labels

  • discussion: This issue needs agreement on some kind of design before it makes sense to implement it, and it either doesn't yet have a design or doesn't yet have agreement on one.
  • feature, bug, crash, refactoring, documentation: These classify the user-facing impact of the change. Specifically "refactoring" means there should be no user-facing effect.