Standard template for Contributing on other repos

[Frijol]

As part of fulfilling #179 (make sure all active repos have contributing guidelines) I started looking at what repos do/don't have guidelines.

Lots of them don't (see the repo audit at #217)! The ones that do have them don't match but express different useful ideas– let's make a template for what CONTRIBUTING.md should look like based on the strengths of the various boilerplates and put it in the template discussed in #170

To complete, we should have a standard Contributing.md that refs back to the canonical one, then check that it's applied to each of:

Update: standard can be found at https://github.com/edgi-govdata-archiving/overview/blob/master/repo_guidelines.md#minimal-contributing-guidelines– to resolve, simply apply the template to the below repos!

• edgi-scripts
• edgi-hubot-halpy
• web-monitoring-processing
• eis-search
• web-monitoring-versionista-scraper
• web-monitoring-ops
• web-monitoring-db
• web-monitoring
• web-monitoring-ui
• matterbridge-heroku
• edgi-website
• archivers-greetingslack
• halpy-ng
• 100days
• awesome-website-change-monitoring
• edgi-acronym-expander-browser-ext
• video-call-landing-page
• eot-nomination-tool

[Frijol]

Here's a proposed template based on ones we already have:

---

Contributing Guidelines

We love improvements to our tools! EDGI has general guidelines for contributing and a code of conduct for all of our organizational repos.

Here are some notes specific to this project:

Use this section for any contributing guidelines specific to the repo. For example:

• Web monitoring's processing repo guidelines mentions which issues should be made on that repo versus on the main web monitoring repo
• In the Web Monitoring umbrella repo's contribution guidelines, a style guide, testing best practices, and notes on how work is distributed (process) are laid out
• The guidelines on the EDGI Scripts repo, video call landing page and 100 Days discuss important notes on how the continuous integration is configured
• The website's contributing guidelines tell you where to find the appropriate Slack channel

[Mr0grog]

We should link (or include) the style guide for the code, if there is any.

[lightandluck]

This template looks great!

+1 adding style guide as example in template. See umbrella web-monitoring repo

[Frijol]

That makes sense. Style guide is considered to be per-repo rather than an EDGI standard?

[Mr0grog]

The web monitoring one applies to all web-monitoring-* repos, but wasn’t done in any way that was coordinated across other EDGI projects. It overlaps a lot with what web-monitoring-ui has (and that’s the only one that has explicit coding style guidelines, IIRC), so it’s all a little messy. I think I’d prefer there only be one for all the projects (and it needs to clarify which rules are language agnostic and which are for a particular language). So, uh, it’s messy.

My ideal would be potentially per-repo, but in most cases many repos would share (e.g. one guide for all web monitoring repos). I think we’d have a hard time agreeing on rules across all EDGI repos, but maybe I’m being pessimistic.

[Frijol]

Currently blocked by #220 – once template is accepted there, I can apply it to the repos merged, can proceed now!