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Contributing to VAST

First, thanks for your interest in contributing to VAST! We welcome and appreciate all contributions, including bug reports, feature suggestions, tutorials/blog posts, and code improvements.

If you're unsure where to start, we recommend our good first issue issue label.

Bug reports and feature suggestions

Bug reports and feature suggestions can be submitted to our issue tracker.

When reporting a bug please provide a minimal example with steps to reproduce the issue if possible. It helps us a lot, as we can get to the bottom of the issue much faster and can even use it as a test case to catch future regressions.

Questions

Questions can be submitted to the discussion page.

For legal reasons, we require contributors to sign our Contributor License Agreement. This will be automatically checked as part of our CI.

Git & Pull Requests

VAST uses the pull request contribution model. Please make an account on Github, fork this repo, and submit code contributions via pull request. For more documentation, look here.

Since VAST does not squash commits in a pull request, it is important to uphold some culture when it comes to commits.

  • Commit should ideally be one simple change.
  • Commit messages follow a simple format: component: Simple sentence with a dot. with maximum of 80 chars and optional longer message.
  • When unsure what component commit modifies, run git log on the modified file(s).
  • Commits should modify only one component (as a result the project does not have to build with each separate commit)
  • If you are having troubles coming up with a simple sentence as a commit message, that is short enough, it may be a good indicator that the commit should be split.

Some pull request guidelines:

  • Minimize irrelevant changes (formatting, whitespace, etc) to code that would otherwise not be touched by this patch. Save formatting or style corrections for a separate pull request that does not make any semantic changes.
  • When possible, large changes should be split up into smaller focused pull requests.
  • Fill out the pull request description with a summary of what your patch does, key changes that have been made, and any further points of discussion, if applicable.
  • Title your pull request with a brief description of what it's changing. "Fixes #123" is a good comment to add to the description, but makes for an unclear title on its own.
  • CI must pass for the PR to be merged.
  • There must be a review from some maintainer that accepts changes for the PR to be merged.