Community contributions are essential part of any open source project. The community has access to a large number of unique configurations which would be extremely difficult for the core maintainers to reproduce. We want to keep it as easy as possible to contribute changes that get things working in your environment. There are a few guidelines that we need contributors to follow so that we can have a chance of keeping on top of things.
- Make sure you have a DNN Tracker account
- Make sure you have a GitHub account
- Submit a ticket for your issue, assuming one does not already exist.
- Clearly describe the issue including steps to reproduce when it is a bug.
- Make sure you fill in the earliest version that you know has the issue.
- Fork the repository on GitHub
- Create a topic branch from where you want to base your work.
- This is usually the 'development' branch.
- Release branches should only be targeted by official committers.
- To quickly create a topic branch based on development;
git checkout -b my_contribution development
- Make commits of logical units.
- Check for unnecessary whitespace with
git diff --check
before committing. - Make sure your commit messages are in the proper format.
(DNN-####) Make the example in CONTRIBUTING imperative and concrete
Without this patch applied the example commit message in the CONTRIBUTING
document is not a concrete example. This is a problem because the
contributor is left to imagine what the commit message should look like
based on a description rather than an example. This patch fixes the
problem by making the example concrete and imperative.
The first line is a real life imperative statement with a ticket number
from our issue tracker. The body describes the behavior without the patch,
why this is a problem, and how the patch fixes the problem when applied.
- For bonus points run and add unit tests
- Make sure you have added the necessary tests for your changes.
- Run all the tests to assure nothing else was accidentally broken.
For changes of a trivial nature to comments and documentation, it is not always necessary to create a new ticket in the issue tracker. In this case, it is appropriate to start the first line of a commit with '(doc)' instead of a ticket number.
(doc) Add documentation commit example to CONTRIBUTING
There is no example for contributing a documentation commit
to the DNN repository. This is a problem because the contributor
is left to assume how a commit of this nature may appear.
The first line is a real life imperative statement with '(doc)' in
place of what would have been the ticket number in a
non-documentation related commit. The body describes the nature of
the new documentation or comments added.
- Sign the Contributor License Agreement.
- Push your changes to a topic branch in your fork of the repository.
- Submit a pull request to the DNN.Platform repository in the DNNSoftware organization.
- The committers will handle updating the associated issue in the DNN Tracker to ensure it gets the necessary code review and QA.