contributing.md

[patrick-fromberg]

contributing.md file would be helpful.

[boris-kolpackov]

Yes, that's been on our TODO list for some time. Are there any specific areas (submitting issues, development setup, submitting patches, legal stuff, etc) that you are looking for?

[patrick-fromberg]

This project is extremely important and I am sure many would like to contribute. But it is a difficult project too and I think this is why not many are contributing. I am considering it but do not really know where to start. The reason why I came here that there is no build system I like even though I had some hope in QBS - but that was discontinued.
An, I want to contribute with development and of course fixing bug's is part of that.

[boris-kolpackov]

Thanks for the feedback. Yes, setting up the environment to develop build2 itself is unfortunately not straightforward primarily because we use it (including bdep) for its own development which often poses chicken-and-egg kinds of problems. But I am planning to write this down at some point.

Also, there are quite a few other ways to contribute besides hacking the build2 core itself (listed in the order of increasing difficulty):

1. Try using build2 in your projects, run into bugs/missing features (inevitable at this stage) and file issues. Then help us come up with a solution by providing feedback, doing research, testing fixes, etc; Testscript reports "stack buffer overrun" when an exception is thrown. #51 is a great example of this process.

2. Package external projects for build2, preferable the ones that you want to use as dependencies in your own projects (we are strong believers in the "scratch your own itch" workflow). We've setup a community for this purpose: https://github.com/build2-packaging/

3. Write build system modules for source code generators, other programming languages, etc. This is still somewhat experimental, but in the 0.12.0 release we are adding support for build system modules and some folks have already started experimenting with it: https://lists.build2.org/archives/users/2019-August/000670.html and continues here: https://lists.build2.org/archives/users/2019-September/000673.html

In the next couple of days I will create the CONTRIBUTING.md file and will move these points there as a start.

[patrick-fromberg]

This is the info I was looking for, thanks.

[boris-kolpackov]

I am going to reopen this for the meantime (until we move things to CONTRIBUTING.md).

[boris-kolpackov]

Added to all the build2 repositories CONTRIBUTING.md that points to our Community page where we now have the Contributing section. Also created #58.