Open Stack

Hey PHP SDK folks (although others are welcome to chime in too),

I am thinking of adding a CONTRIBUTING.rst to the root of our repo at http://git.openstack.org/cgit/stackforge/openstack-sdk-php/tree/. My immediate, selfish need is to have a single place where we capture any decisions around contribution process so I don’t have to remember them or rehash them often. Longer term I think this would be useful to all potential contributors - in making them feel welcome and less overwhelmed - especially as the project grows.

If you think this would be a useful addition, please read on.

Putting on a new contributor’s hat, here are some of the questions (in no particular order) that come to my mind when I encounter a new project:

1. What is the overall development process?
2. I see a bunch of directories and files in the source tree. What do these mean?
3. What do I need to setup in my development environment so I can contribute?
4. Are there any coding standards I should adhere to?
5. I'm ready to submit my first patch. What happens next?
6. How do I run the unit tests?
7. How do I run the integration tests?

Can you think of more questions, ones you might’ve had in the past perhaps?

I imagine the CONTRIBUTING.rst to be comprised of answers to these questions (but perhaps not necessarily in Q&A format). I realize that some of these answers would overlap with information that already exists elsewhere. We would link to those sources while still giving our contributors a single starting point within the context of our project.

Please note that, at this time, I’m just soliciting approval for having a CONTRIBUTING.rst and coming up with the list of questions that it would answer. I am not (yet) looking for us to come up with all the answers and agree on them as a team.

Thoughts?

Shaunak