Open Stack

On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 2:48 PM, Shaunak Kashyap
<shaunak.kashyap at rackspace.com> wrote:
> 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?

These are all good questions for helping out new and infrequent
contributors. Many of the other projects answer those sorts of
questions in the developer documentation (under doc/source in the
repository) and have a boilerplate CONTRIBUTING.rst file that points
to the OpenStack wiki for workflow information, so you might consider
doing something similar.

Doug

>
> Shaunak
>
>
>
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