Merge pull request #285 from SylvainCorlay/contributing-guidelines

Add contributing guidelines

CONTRIBUTING.md

@@ -0,0 +1,27 @@
+# Contributing to Xeus-cling
+
+Xeus and xeus-cling are a subprojects of Project Jupyter and subject to the [Jupyter governance](https://github.com/jupyter/governance) and [Code of conduct](https://github.com/jupyter/governance/blob/master/conduct/code_of_conduct.md).
+
+## General Guidelines
+
+For general documentation about contributing to Jupyter projects, see the [Project Jupyter Contributor Documentation](https://jupyter.readthedocs.io/en/latest/contributor/content-contributor.html).
+
+## Community
+
+The Xeus team organizes public video meetings. The schedule for future meetings and minutes of past meetings can be found on our [team compass](https://jupyter-xeus.github.io/).
+
+## Setting up a development environment
+
+First, you need to fork the project. Then setup your environment:
+
+```bash
+# create a new conda environment
+conda create -n xeus-cling -c conda-forge -c defaults xtl nlohmann_json cppzmq cxxopts pugixml xeus cling
+conda activate xeus-cling
+
+# download xeus-cling from your GitHub fork
+git clone https://github.com/<your-github-username>/xeus-cling.git
+```
+
+You may also want to install a C++ compiler, cmake, and pkg-config from conda if they are not available on your system. Pkg-config is required at build time for locating zeromq and OpenSSL.
+

README.md

@@ -13,7 +13,7 @@ the native implementation of the Jupyter protocol [xeus](https://github.com/Quan
 
 xeus-cling has been packaged for the conda package manager on the **Linux** and **OS X** platforms. At the moment, we are not providing packages for the **Windows** platform.
 
-To ensure that the installation works, it is preferable to install `xeus-cling` in a fresh conda environment. It is also needed to use a [miniconda](https://conda.io/miniconda.html) installation because with the full [anaconda](https://www.anaconda.com/) you may have a conflict with the `zeromq` library which is already installed in the anaconda distribution.
+To ensure that the installation works, it is preferable to install `xeus-cling` in a fresh conda environment. It is also needed to use a [miniconda](https://conda.io/miniconda.html) installation because with the full [anaconda](https://www.anaconda.com/) you may have a conflict with the `ZeroMQ` library which is already installed in the anaconda distribution.
 
 
 The safest usage is to create an environment named `cling` with your miniconda installation
@@ -114,6 +114,10 @@ A C++ backend for the Jupyter interactive widgets is available in the [`xwidgets
 
 `xeus-cling` requires its dependencies to be built with the same compiler and same C runtime as the one used to build `cling`.
 
+## Contributing
+
+See [CONTRIBUTING.md](./CONTRIBUTING.md) to know how to contribute and set up a development environment.
+
 ## License
 
 We use a shared copyright model that enables all contributors to maintain the