gnu-social/DOCUMENTATION/DEVELOPERS

Contributing to GNU social

First of all, if you're reading this intending to contribute to GNU social, thanks! Free software development only happens when people like you take an interest in giving back to the software they themselves use, and their community.

When contributing to this repository, please first discuss the change you wish to make via issue, email, or any other method with the owners of this repository before making a change.

There's a few files you should read before going forward with a merge request or a patch submission. They detail what this file touches on in brief. They are:

• DOCUMENTATION/DEVELOPERS/CONTRIBUTING/coding_standards.md: How your code should be structured and formatted to be accepted into the GNU social codebase.
• /DOCUMENTATION/DEVELOPERS/CONTRIBUTING/merge_request_checklist.md: A quick checklist to review before submission.

Merge Request Process

1. Run php-cs-fixer. We also recommend you to use tools like phpstan, phpactor, phpcs and phpmd
2. Run our unit tests (./vendor/bin/phpunit --testsuite Core)
3. Respect our VERSIONING system
4. You may merge the Merge Request in once you have the sign-off of two other developers, or if you do not have permission to do that, you may request the second reviewer to merge it for you

Coding Standards

Since we will be expected to maintain your code once it's submitted, we ask you to adhere to certain coding standards that make it easier for us to do so. If code doesn't follow them, it will be rejected, so please read up on these.

Bug Reports

Please report bugs to the issue tracker at https://notabug.org/diogo/gnu-social/issues Avoid assigning the labels yourself, as these are for the development team to assign priority and area of coverage to a subject. Please only submit something here if you are certain it is a bug or represents a feature enhancement that we do not presently have. If you are uncertain whether it's a bug, please feel free to ask at #social IRC channel on freenode.net https://www.freenode.net/.

When reporting a bug, please try to include as much information as possible, including the environment being run on (if it's a common LAMP stack just give us version numbers of the main stack components, that's fine), and the specific error you get. If you do not get a client-facing error, please check the PHP error_log and ensure there isn't something silently reported there, as well as the GNU social log. Try to include steps to reproduce the error as well, as if we cannot reproduce the error, we can't fix it!

It is perfectly acceptable to reference the archive page of a discussion on the mailing list for the bug report, by the way, as long as it includes all the information we need for a bug report.

Submitting Feature Requests / Enhancement Requests

Social media is constantly evolving, and we welcome ideas about how we can change and evolve GNU social to keep it the excellent piece of software that it is. However, there are a few things we ask you do when submitting feature requests:

1. Understand that since we have a limited amount of developers and these people contribute in their free time, we may prioritize things differently than you value them. Oftentimes this is because certain requests involve less changes to the existing codebase than others, and therefore this makes them easier to add.
2. Please search the existing feature requests and enhancements to see if a similar request exists. If one does but you have different ideas about how to do it or what it should entail, please add a comment to the existing idea rather than create a new one for your "version" of it. Duplicate submissions mean we spend more time maintaining the tracker and less time actually working on the codebase!
3. When outlining the way that you see something working, don't be afraid to be as detailed as possible! We may not implement it exactly as you describe for any variety of reasons, but the more concrete and fleshed out an idea is, the easier it is for us to know what you want and be able to implement it in a sane and secure fashion.
4. When describing a possible new idea and its mechanisms of operation, the key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in the issue submission are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2119

Finally, and just as a call back to the first point, realize just because we might not rush to implement something, doesn't mean that we don't want to implement it! We would rather take the time to do something right the first time, then hurriedly apply a new idea, or a fix, only to have to patch it later.

Branch of Code Submissions

Unless you've been specifically directed otherwise, all submissions of code should be against the nightly branch, so make sure any modifications are based on Nightly.

Copyright / Licensing

You acknowledge that by submitting code to GNU social, you are licensing it under the GNU AGPLv3 unless there is an extenuating circumstance where it would be licensed differently (such as modifications to an external library we include such as Stomp).

You also acknowledge that unless you assign a copyright explicitly, it will be assumed to be assigned to GNU social.

Thanks for considering submission, and happy hacking!