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CONTRIBUTING.md

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Contribution Guidelines

Introduction

This document explains how to contribute changes to the smoney-java-client project.

Bug reports

Please search the issues on the issue tracker with a variety of keywords to ensure your bug is not already reported.

If unique, open an issue and answer the questions so we can understand and reproduce the problematic behavior.

The burden is on you to convince us that it is actually a bug in smoney-java-client. This is easiest to do when you write clear, concise instructions so we can reproduce the behavior (even if it seems obvious). The more detailed and specific you are, the faster we will be able to help you. Check out How to Report Bugs Effectively.

Please be kind, remember that smoney-java-client comes at no cost to you, and you're getting free help.

Code review

Changes to smoney-java-client must be reviewed before they are accepted, no matter who makes the change even if it is an owner or a maintainer. We use GitHub's pull request workflow to do that.

Please try to make your pull request easy to review for us. Please read the "How to get faster PR reviews" guide, it has lots of useful tips for any project you may want to contribute. Some of the key points:

  • Make small pull requests. The smaller, the faster to review and the more likely it will be merged soon.
  • Don't make changes unrelated to your PR. Maybe there are typos on some comments, maybe refactoring would be welcome on a function... but if that is not related to your PR, please make another PR for that.
  • Split big pull requests in multiple small ones. An incremental change will be faster to review than a huge PR.

Sign your work

The sign-off is a simple line at the end of the explanation for the patch. Your signature certifies that you wrote the patch or otherwise have the right to pass it on as an open-source patch.

Signed-off-by: John Smith <john.smith@email.com>

Please use your real name, we really dislike pseudonyms or anonymous contributions. We are in the opensource world without secrets. If you have set your user.name and user.email, you can sign your commit automatically with git commit -s.

Write a good commit message

A good commit message serve at least three important purposes:

  • To speed up the reviewing process.

  • To help us write a good release note.

  • To help the future maintainers of smoney-java-client, say five years into the future, to find out why a particular change was made to the code or why a specific feature was added.

Structure your commit message like this:

From: [[http://git-scm.com/book/ch5-2.html]]

Short (50 chars or less) summary of changes

More detailed explanatory text, if necessary.  Wrap it to about 72
characters or so.  In some contexts, the first line is treated as the
subject of an email and the rest of the text as the body.  The blank
line separating the summary from the body is critical (unless you omit
the body entirely); tools like rebase can get confused if you run the
two together.

Further paragraphs come after blank lines.

  - Bullet points are okay, too

  - Typically a hyphen or asterisk is used for the bullet, preceded by a
    single space, with blank lines in between, but conventions vary here

DO

  • Write the summary line and description of what you have done in the imperative mode, that is as if you were commanding someone. Start the line with "Fix", "Add", "Change" instead of "Fixed", "Added", "Changed".
  • Always leave the second line blank.
  • Line break the commit message (to make the commit message readable without having to scroll horizontally in gitk).

DON'T

  • Don't end the summary line with a period - it's a title and titles don't end with a period.

Tips

  • If it seems difficult to summarize what your commit does, it may be because it includes several logical changes or bug fixes, and are better split up into several commits using git add -p.

References

The following blog post has a nice discussion of commit messages: http://chris.beams.io/posts/git-commit/