Thank you for taking the time to contribute. We appreciate it!
This project is being run in close coordination with the GA4GH schemas and associated reference server projects. As a result, contributions to this project should be tied to corresponding contributions in the other two projects. Please see the GA4GH schemas contribution document for details on contributing to the overall effort.
Not all changes to this repository will necessarily be tied to changes in schemas or server. Simple bugfixes and minor documentation updates to the compliance repository should follow the below contribution guidelines:
There are two ways to contribute to this effort. The first way is to use this project's Issues Page, which we use as a forum to discuss both major and minor issues related to developing the GA4GH compliance tests. See the Issue Resolution section below for specifics on how issues are resolved by the community.
A second way to contribute to the project is to directly contribute development effort. Please refer to the next section, Contributions and Pull Request, for more details.
GitHub pull requests should be used to contribute development effort and code to the project. GitHub provides a nice overview on how to create a pull request.
Some general rules to follow:
- Fork the main project into your personal GitHub space to work on.
- Create a branch for each update that you're working on. These branches are often called "feature" or "topic" branches. Any changes that you push to your feature branch will automatically be shown in the pull request.
- Keep your pull requests as small as possible. Large pull requests are hard to review. Try to break up your changes into self-contained and incremental pull requests.
- The first line of commit messages should be a short (<80 character) summary, followed by an empty line and then any details that you want to share about the commit.
- Please try to follow the existing syntax style
When you submit or change your pull request, the Travis build system will automatically run tests to ensure valid schema syntax. If your pull request fails to pass tests, review the test log, make changes and then push them to your feature branch to be tested again.
Once a pull request or issue have been submitted, anyone can comment or vote on an issue to express their opinion following the Apache voting system. Quick summary:
- +1 something you agree with
- -1 if you have a strong objection to an issue, which will be taken very seriously. A -1 vote should provide an alternative solution.
- +0 or -0 for neutral comments or weak opinions.
- It's okay to have input without voting
- Silence gives assent
A pull request with no -1 votes is ready to be merged. The merge should be done by someone from a different organization than the submitter.
If an issue gets any -1 votes, the comments on the issue need to reach consensus before the issue can be resolved one way or the other. There isn't any strict time limit on a contentious issue.
In case a merge happens too quickly, closed pull requests can also get -1 votes, which will always need to be resolved.
The project will strive for full consensus on everything until it runs into a problem with that model.