How to Contribute

We want your help to make the Samvera community great. There are a few guidelines that we need contributors to follow so that we can have a chance of keeping on top of things.

Code of Conduct

The Samvera Community is dedicated to providing a welcoming and positive experience for all its members, whether they are at a formal gathering, in a social setting, or taking part in activities online. Please see our Code of Conduct for more information.

Samvera Community Intellectual Property Licensing and Ownership

All code contributors must have an Individual Contributor License Agreement (iCLA) on file with the Samvera Steering Group. If the contributor works for an institution, the institution must have a Corporate Contributor License Agreement (cCLA) on file.

wiki.duraspace.org/display/samvera/Samvera+Community+Intellectual+Property+Licensing+and+Ownership

You should also add yourself to the CONTRIBUTORS.md file in the root of the project.

Contribution Tasks

Reporting Issues

Making Changes

Documenting Code

Committing changes

Present tense short summary (50 characters or less)

    More detailed description, if necessary. It should be wrapped to 72
    characters. Try to be as descriptive as you can, even if you think that
    the commit content is obvious, it may not be obvious to others. You
    should add such description also if it's already present in bug tracker,
    it should not be necessary to visit a webpage to check the history.

    Include Closes #<issue-number> when relavent.

    Description can have multiple paragraphs and you can use code examples
    inside, just indent it with 4 spaces:

        class PostsController
          def index
            respond_to do |wants|
              wants.html { render 'index' }
            end
          end
        end

    You can also add bullet points:

    - you can use dashes or asterisks

    - also, try to indent next line of a point for readability, if it's too
      long to fit in 72 characters

Submitting Changes

Reviewing and Merging Changes

We adopted Github’s Pull Request Review for our repositories. Common checks that may occur in our repositories:

  1. Travis CI - where our automated tests are running

  2. Approval Required - Github enforces at least one person approve a pull request. Also, all reviewers that have chimed in must approve.

If one or more of the required checks failed (or are incomplete), the code should not be merged (and the UI will not allow it). If all of the checks have passed, then anyone on the project (including the pull request submitter) may merge the code.

Example: Carolyn submits a pull request, Justin reviews the pull request and approves. However, Justin is still waiting on other checks (Travis CI is usually the culprit), so he does not merge the pull request. Eventually, all of the checks pass. At this point, Carolyn or anyone else may merge the pull request.

Things to Consider When Reviewing

First, the person contributing the code is putting themselves out there. Be mindful of what you say in a review.

This is your chance for a mentoring moment of another developer. Take time to give an honest and thorough review of what has changed. Things to consider:

If you are uncertain, bring other contributors into the conversation by assigning them as a reviewer.

Additional Resources