gnu-social/DOCUMENTATION/DEVELOPERS/CONTRIBUTING

Contributing to GNU social

First of all, if you're reading this intending to contribute to GNU social, thanks! Free software development only happens when people like you take an interest in giving back to the software they themselves use, and their community.

When contributing to this repository, please first discuss the change you wish to make via issue, email, or any other method with the owners of this repository before making a change.

There's a few files you should read before going forward with a merge request or a patch submission. They detail what this file touches on in brief. They are:

• coding_standards.md: How your code should be structured and formatted to be accepted into the GNU social codebase.
• merge_request_checklist.md: A quick checklist to review before submission.

Merge Request Process

1. Ensure you strip any trailing spaces off and checked the file with php-cs-fixer
2. Increase the version numbers in any examples files and the README.md to the new version that this Pull Request would represent. The versioning scheme we use is SemVer.
3. You may merge the Pull Request in once you have the sign-off of two other developers, or if you do not have permission to do that, you may request the second reviewer to merge it for you.

Code of Conduct

Our Pledge

In the interest of fostering an open and welcoming environment, we as contributors and maintainers pledge to making participation in our project and our community a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of age, body size, disability, ethnicity, gender identity and expression, level of experience, nationality, personal appearance, race, religion, or sexual identity and orientation.

Our Standards

Examples of behavior that contributes to creating a positive environment include:

• Using welcoming and inclusive language
• Being respectful of differing viewpoints and experiences
• Gracefully accepting constructive criticism
• Focusing on what is best for the community
• Showing empathy towards other community members

Examples of unacceptable behavior by participants include:

• The use of sexualized language or imagery and unwelcome sexual attention or advances
• Trolling, insulting/derogatory comments, and personal or political attacks
• Public or private harassment
• Publishing others' private information, such as a physical or electronic address, without explicit permission
• Other conduct which could reasonably be considered inappropriate in a professional setting

Our Responsibilities

Project maintainers are responsible for clarifying the standards of acceptable behavior and are expected to take appropriate and fair corrective action in response to any instances of unacceptable behavior.

Project maintainers have the right and responsibility to remove, edit, or reject comments, commits, code, wiki edits, issues, and other contributions that are not aligned to this Code of Conduct, or to ban temporarily or permanently any contributor for other behaviors that they deem inappropriate, threatening, offensive, or harmful.

Scope

This Code of Conduct applies both within project spaces and in public spaces when an individual is representing the project or its community. Examples of representing a project or community include using an official project e-mail address, posting via an official social media account, or acting as an appointed representative at an online or offline event. Representation of a project may be further defined and clarified by project maintainers.

Enforcement

Instances of abusive, harassing, or otherwise unacceptable behavior may be reported by contacting the project team at [INSERT EMAIL ADDRESS]. All complaints will be reviewed and investigated and will result in a response that is deemed necessary and appropriate to the circumstances. The project team is obligated to maintain confidentiality with regard to the reporter of an incident. Further details of specific enforcement policies may be posted separately.

Project maintainers who do not follow or enforce the Code of Conduct in good faith may face temporary or permanent repercussions as determined by other members of the project's leadership.

Attribution

This Code of Conduct is adapted from the Contributor Covenant, version 1.4, available at http://contributor-covenant.org/version/1/4

The Code of Conflict

GNU social has a high submission standard and we want to keep quality code in the codebase and bad code out of it. As such your code will be closely scrutinized, and you might take this criticism personally. Please understand that this is meant to keep the standards of the codebase up, and isn't meant personally. All the same, this isn't an excuse for poor behaviour, and a reviewer shouldn't be misbehaving towards submitters. The Code of Conflict outlines the dispute resolution mechanism if something does come up, so give it a read.

Coding Standards

Since we will be expected to maintain your code once it's submitted, we ask you to adhere to certain coding standards that make it easier for us to do so. If code doesn't follow them, it will be rejected, so please read up on these.

Bug Reports

Please report bugs to the issue tracker at https://notabug.org/diogo/gnu-social/issues Avoid assigning the labels yourself, as these are for the development team to assign priority and area of coverage to a subject. Please only submit something here if you are certain it is a bug or represents a feature enhancement that we do not presently have. If you are uncertain whether it's a bug, please feel free to ask at #social IRC channel on freenode.net https://www.freenode.net/.

When reporting a bug, please try to include as much information as possible, including the environment being run on (if it's a common LAMP stack just give us version numbers of the main stack components, that's fine), and the specific error you get. If you do not get a client-facing error, please check the PHP error_log and ensure there isn't something silently reported there, as well as the GNU social log. Try to include steps to reproduce the error as well, as if we cannot reproduce the error, we can't fix it!

It is perfectly acceptable to reference the archive page of a discussion on the mailing list for the bug report, by the way, as long as it includes all the information we need for a bug report.

Submitting Feature Requests / Enhancement Requests

Social media is constantly evolving, and we welcome ideas about how we can change and evolve GNU social to keep it the excellent piece of software that it is. However, there are a few things we ask you do when submitting feature requests:

1. Understand that since we have a limited amount of developers and these people contribute in their free time, we may prioritize things differently than you value them. Oftentimes this is because certain requests involve less changes to the existing codebase than others, and therefore this makes them easier to add.
2. Please search the existing feature requests and enhancements to see if a similar request exists. If one does but you have different ideas about how to do it or what it should entail, please add a comment to the existing idea rather than create a new one for your "version" of it. Duplicate submissions mean we spend more time maintaining the tracker and less time actually working on the codebase!
3. When outlining the way that you see something working, don't be afraid to be as detailed as possible! We may not implement it exactly as you describe for any variety of reasons, but the more concrete and fleshed out an idea is, the easier it is for us to know what you want and be able to implement it in a sane and secure fashion.
4. When describing a possible new idea and its mechanisms of operation, the key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in the issue submission are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2119

Finally, and just as a call back to the first point, realize just because we might not rush to implement something, doesn't mean that we don't want to implement it! We would rather take the time to do something right the first time, then hurriedly apply a new idea, or a fix, only to have to patch it later.

Branch of Code Submissions

Unless you've been specifically directed otherwise, all submissions of code should be against the nightly branch, so make sure any modifications are based on Nightly.

Copyright / Licensing

You acknowledge that by submitting code to GNU social, you are licensing it under the GNU AGPLv3 unless there is an extenuating circumstance where it would be licensed differently (such as modifications to an external library we include such as Stomp).

You also acknowledge that unless you assign a copyright explicitly, it will be assumed to be assigned to GNU social.

Thanks for considering submission, and happy hacking!