Contributing
This page includes information about contributing to SFOSC
Request for Contributions
We would love to have you help us evolve the principles, write new social contracts, and further explore what it means to create sustainable free and open source communities.
In particular, we seek the following types of contributions:
- ideas: participate in an issues thread or start your own to voice your idea
- copy editing: contribute your expertise by helping us expand, clarify and proofing our content
- code: improve the design, usability and functionality of the sfosc page
- artwork: contribute graphics or any other artwork improving the presentation of sfosc
Read this guide on how to do that.
How to Contribute Ideas
Prerequisites: familiarity with GitHub Issues.
Our community mainly communicates over github issues threads. Please voice any idea, criticism or feedback in them so we can have an open discussion. Of course you can also feel free to contact any of our members privately if you think this is necessary.
How to Contribute Code
Prerequisites: familiarity with GitHub Pull Requests
If you want to contribute code, fork the repository and make a pull-request with your changes.
If you want to view/test your changes locally before, you can build this static web page with hugo, please check their extensive documentation on how to install and use this site generator.
A sfosc member will review your pull-request. And if the pull request gets a positive review the reviewer will merge it.
However, please bear in mind the following things:
Discuss Large Changes in Advance
If you see a glaring flaw within the SFOSC, resist the urge to jump into the code and make sweeping changes right away. We know it can be tempting, but especially for large, structural changes it’s a wiser choice to first discuss them in the issue list. It may turn out that someone is already working on this or that someone already has tried to solve this and hit a roadblock, maybe there even is a good reason why that flaw exists. If nothing else, a discussion of the change will usually familiarize the reviewer with your proposed changes and streamline the review process when you finally create a pull request.
A good rule of thumb for when you should discuss on the issue list is to estimate how much time would be wasted if the pull request was rejected. If it’s a couple of minutes then you can probably dive head first and eat the loss in the worst case. Otherwise, making a quick check with the other developers could save you lots of time down the line.
Small Commits & Pull Request Scope
A commit should contain a single logical change, the scope should be as small as possible. And a pull request should only consist of the commits that you need for your change. If it’s possible for you to split larger changes into smaller blocks please do so.
Limiting the scope of commits/pull requests makes reviewing much easier. Because it will usually mean each commit can be evaluated independently and a smaller amount of commits per pull request usually also means a smaller amount of code to be reviewed.
Proper Commit Messages
We are keen on proper commit messages because they will help us to maintain this in the future.
- The title of your commit should summarizes what has been done
- If the title is to small to explain what you have done then elaborate on it in the body
- Explain why you have changed this instead of the how. This is the most important content of the message.
- Explain potential side-effects of this change, if there are any
Please also:
- Leave a blank line between the commit subject and body
Tools like rebase could not work properly otherwise.
- Mention related issues
If this commit fixes an issue you need to mention it like Fixes #1234
- Give kudos to Co-authors
If the commit has more than one author tag them with Co-authored-by: name <name@example.com>.
Try that the commit subject is not longer than 50 characters
Try that each line of the commit body is not longer than 72 characters
How to Conduct Yourself
Please make sure that while contributing you follow our Contributor Covenant Code of Conduct!
Happy Hacking! - :heart: Your SFOSC Team