Our project welcomes external contributions. If you have an itch, please feel free to scratch it.
To contribute code or documentation, please submit a pull request.
A good way to familiarize yourself with the codebase and contribution process is to look for and tackle low-hanging fruit in the issue tracker. Before embarking on a more ambitious contribution, please quickly get in touch with us.
For general questions or support requests, please refer to the discussion section.
Note: We appreciate your effort, and want to avoid a situation where a contribution requires extensive rework (by you or by us), sits in backlog for a long time, or cannot be accepted at all!
If you would like to implement a new feature, please raise an issue before sending a pull request so the feature can be discussed. This is to avoid you wasting your valuable time working on a feature that the project developers are not interested in accepting into the code base.
If you would like to fix a bug, please raise an issue before sending a pull request so it can be tracked.
The project maintainers use LGTM (Looks Good To Me) in comments on the code review to indicate acceptance. A change requires LGTMs from two of the maintainers of each component affected.
For a list of the maintainers, see the MAINTAINERS.md page.
Each source file must include a license header for the MIT Software. Using the SPDX format is the simplest approach. e.g.
/*
Copyright IBM Inc. All rights reserved.
SPDX-License-Identifier: MIT
*/
We have tried to make it as easy as possible to make contributions. This applies to how we handle the legal aspects of contribution. We use the same approach - the Developer's Certificate of Origin 1.1 (DCO) - that the Linux® Kernel community uses to manage code contributions.
We simply ask that when submitting a patch for review, the developer must include a sign-off statement in the commit message.
Here is an example Signed-off-by line, which indicates that the submitter accepts the DCO:
Signed-off-by: John Doe <[email protected]>
You can include this automatically when you commit a change to your local git repository using the following command:
git commit -s
Please feel free to connect with us using the discussion section.
We use Poetry to manage dependencies.
To install, see the documentation here: https://python-poetry.org/docs/master/#installing-with-the-official-installer
-
Install the Poetry globally in your machine
curl -sSL https://install.python-poetry.org | python3 -
The installation script will print the installation bin folder
POETRY_BIN
which you need in the next steps. -
Make sure Poetry is in your
$PATH
-
for
zsh
echo 'export PATH="POETRY_BIN:$PATH"' >> ~/.zshrc
-
for
bash
echo 'export PATH="POETRY_BIN:$PATH"' >> ~/.bashrc
-
-
The official guidelines linked above include useful details on the configuration of autocomplete for most shell environments, e.g. Bash and Zsh.
To activate the Virtual Environment, run:
poetry shell
To spawn a shell with the Virtual Environment activated. If the Virtual Environment doesn't exist, Poetry will create one for you. Then, to install dependencies, run:
poetry install
If for whatever reason you need to work in a specific (older) version of Python, run:
poetry env use $(which python3.10)
This creates a Virtual Environment with Python 3.10. For other versions, replace $(which python3.10)
by the path to the interpreter (e.g., /usr/bin/python3.8
) or use $(which pythonX.Y)
.
poetry add NAME
We use the following tools to enforce code style:
- iSort, to sort imports
- Black, to format code
We run a series of checks on the code base on every commit, using pre-commit
. To install the hooks, run:
pre-commit install
To run the checks on-demand, run:
pre-commit run --all-files
Note: Checks like Black
and isort
will "fail" if they modify files. This is because pre-commit
doesn't like to see files modified by their Hooks. In these cases, git add
the modified files and git commit
again.