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icon Documentation: Contribution guide

This guide is based on GitHub's example contribution guide and Scott Chacon's GitHub flow article.


Please take a moment to review this document in order to make the contribution process easy and effective for everyone involved.

Following these guidelines helps to communicate that you respect the time of the developers managing and developing this open source project. In return, they should reciprocate that respect in addressing your issue or assessing patches and features.

Technical prerequisites

Because of the backwards compatibility you're required to have the following sdk's installed locally:

Both of these are out of support, so you will need to enable them in the Visual Studio Installer.
Or, install them from dotnet.microsoft.com if you're not using Visual Studio.

Using the issue tracker

The issue tracker is the preferred channel for bug reports, features requests and submitting pull requests, but please respect the following restrictions:

  • Please do not derail or troll issues.
  • Keep the discussion on topic and respect the opinions of others.

Bug reports

A bug is a demonstrable problem that is caused by the code in the repository. Good bug reports are extremely helpful - thank you!

Guidelines for bug reports:

  1. Use the GitHub issue search
    Check if the issue has already been reported.
  2. Check if the issue has been fixed
    Try to reproduce it using the latest master or development branch in the repository.
  3. Isolate the problem
    Make sure that the code in the repository is definitely responsible for the issue.

A good bug report shouldn't leave others needing to chase you up for more information. Please try to be as detailed as possible in your report.

Feature requests

Feature requests are welcome. But take a moment to find out whether your idea fits with the scope and aims of the project.
It's up to you to make a strong case to convince the developers of the merits of this feature.
Please provide as much detail and context as possible.

Contribution flow

The contribution flow is loosely based on Scott Chacon's GitHub flow article. Following this process is the best way to get your work merged:

Please ask first before embarking on any significant code change (e.g. implementing features, refactoring code), otherwise you risk spending a lot of time working on something that the developers might not want to merge into the project.

Anything in the master branch is deployable

Make sure your code is deploy ready. Everything is thoroughly tested by unit-tests and code inspection. However, if you're not sure you can and should deploy an alpha version and manually test before merging.

Create descriptive branches off of master

(Optional) Fork

Fork the repo, clone your fork, and configure the remotes:

# Clone your fork of the repo into the current directory
git clone https://github.com/<your-username>/<repo-name>
# Navigate to the newly cloned directory
cd <repo-name>
# Assign the original repo to a remote called "upstream"
git remote add upstream https://github.com/<upsteam-owner>/<repo-name>

If you cloned a while ago, get the latest changes from upstream:

git checkout main
git pull upstream main

Create a new topic branch (off the main branch) to contain your feature, change, or fix:

git checkout -b <issue-number>-<friendly-description>

It's probably easiest to use the title of the issue as the <friendly description>.

Or (if you're not forked) you can use the GitHub UI:

Using the GitHub UI

Create a branch form an issue
Create a branch form an issue wizard

Push to named branches constantly

Commit your changes in logical chunks, make your change's intent clear in the message.

Please adhere to these git commit message guidelines or your code is unlikely be merged into the main project.
Please prepend all your commit messages with [#<issue-number>]<space>;
You will see older commit messages but that turned out to be difficult with merge conflict messages and git commit --amend or it didn't link easily.

Push often, make sure other contributors can see your progress.

Regularly rebase the upstream main branch into your topic branch, preferably before pushing:

git pull --rebase upstream main

Use Git's interactive rebase feature to tidy up your commits before making them public.

Open a pull request at any time

Good pull requests - patches, improvements, new features - are a fantastic help.
They should remain focused in scope and avoid containing unrelated commits.

Your changes do not have to be ready to open a pull request.
However if you don't intend it to be merged, please state so in your PR.
If you do intend it to be merged, please use the auto-merge functionality.
Please don't squash, we care about the merge history.

Open a Pull Request with a clear title and description. The target branch should be the main branch unless you're instructed to use a different branch by a maintainer.
When finalizing a PR for merging all items of the DOD have to be checked, this DOD will be included in the PR by default.
You're not allowed to remove items. However, feel free to add any checks if applicable.

Final pull request

When finalizing your change please make sure you:

  • State it's meant for merging
  • Turn on auto merge
  • Add release notes to the Changelog.md in the projects you changed, with a link to the GitHub issue. Make sure it's in the ## @next chapter so it get's added to the next package publish automagically. Eg. - [#150](https://github.com/Marvin-Brouwer/FluentSerializer/issues/150) Added release notes
  • Check all the items in the DOD that's included in the PR template.

Release management

Once your feature is merged a maintainer will take over.
A deploy will be scheduled.
See: Maintaining: Release management