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CONTRIBUTING.md

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Contributing to SuperCollider

First and foremost, thank you! We appreciate that you want to contribute to SuperCollider. Your time is valuable, and your contributions mean a lot to us.

What does "contributing" mean?

Creating an issue is the simplest form of contributing to a project. But there are many ways to contribute, including the following:

  • Updating or correcting documentation
  • Feature requests
  • Bug reports
  • Translation files for the IDE

If you'd like to learn more about contributing in general, the Guide to Idiomatic Contributing has a lot of useful information.

Showing support for SuperCollider

Please keep in mind that open source software is built by people like you, who spend their free time creating things the rest the community can use.

Don't have time to contribute? No worries, here are some other ways to show your support for SuperCollider:

Getting Started

Issues

Before creating an issue

Try to follow these guidelines:

  • Investigate the issue: what is the minimum effort or code required to produce the issue? Can you get it to happen on someone else's computer? Someone else's operating system? Does it happen every time?
  • See if a ticket already exists: search SuperCollider's open issues. If an issue for your problem already exists, let us know by commenting there. Make sure you give your version and system info and any information that you don't see already noted in the ticket.
  • Ask the community: if you are unsure about how to investigate or recreate an issue, it may help to ask the sc-dev and sc-users mailing lists, or the Facebook group.
  • Create the issue in the appropriate repository. Note that sc3-plugins are maintained separately from SuperCollider.

Creating an issue

Please be as descriptive as possible when creating an issue. Give us the information we need to successfully answer your question or address your issue by answering the following in your issue:

  • version: please note the version of SuperCollider are you using
  • system: please note your operating system and version
  • extensions, plugins, helpers, etc. (if applicable): please list any extensions or modifications you're using
  • error messages: please paste any error messages, in their entirety, into the issue, or a gist.

Pull Requests

Before making changes

  • Create a fork of the SuperCollider repository.
  • Clone the repo and its submodules locally: git clone --recursive https://github.com/your-name/supercollider.git.
    • If you have created the fork before, bring it up-to-date with the SuperCollider repository. See updating your fork below for details.
  • Create a topic branch from where you want to base your work.
    • This is the develop branch.
    • Our branch naming convention is topic/branch-description: for example, topic/fix-sinosc or topic/document-object.
    • To quickly create a topic branch based on develop: git checkout -b topic/my-fix develop.
    • Please avoid working directly on the develop branch.
    • Please do not work off of the master branch, which is stable and only includes releases.
  • As the time passes, make sure to keep your fork updated - see Updating your fork below.

Making changes

  • Make commits of logical units.

  • Please refer to Code Style Guide. Note that code style, such as whitespace conventions, depend on the language (C++ vs SuperCollider vs SCDoc Markup)

  • Make sure your commit messages are descriptive and in the proper format.

    • Commit messages follow the schema "category: content", e.g. docs: Make the example in CONTRIBUTING imperative and concrete, or help: Update RunningSum2 help file, or class library: do this and that, or plugins: add missing function definition.

    • A more complete example:

        docs: Make the example in CONTRIBUTING imperative and concrete

  Without this patch applied the example commit message in the CONTRIBUTING
  document is not a concrete example. This is a problem because the
  contributor is left to imagine what the commit message should look like
  based on a description rather than an example. This patch fixes the
  problem by making the example concrete and imperative.

  The first line is a real life imperative statement which optionally identifies
  the component being changed. The body describes the behavior without the patch,
  why this is a problem, and how the patch fixes the problem when applied.

  • Make sure you have added the necessary tests for your changes.

  • Make sure you have documented your changes, if necessary.

Submitting changes as Pull Requests

  • Push your changes to a topic branch in the fork of your repository. If you are working locally, do this with git push -u origin topic/branch-description. origin should be the remote of your fork; check with git remote -v.
  • Submit a pull request to the SuperCollider repository.
  • The core team looks at pull requests on a regular basis in a weekly meeting that we hold in a public meeting. The hangout is announced in the weekly status updates that are sent to the sc-dev list.
  • You may receive feedback and requests for changes. We expect changes to be made in a timely manner. We may close the pull request if it isn't showing any activity.

Updating your fork

In order to keep your fork up-to-date, you need to point it to the main SuperCollider repository. This is done by adding the main repository as another remote, usually called upstream. Please note: naming the main repository upstream is just a convention, not a requirement. If you already have a differently named remote pointing to the main SuperCollider repository, you can use that name instead of upstream.

  • If you have not yet added the upstream remote, do so now:

    • Check the list of remotes: git remote -v. The output should look like this:

        origin	https://github.com/your-name/supercollider.git (fetch)
  origin	https://github.com/your-name/supercollider.git (push)

    • Add a new remote called upstream, pointing to the SuperCollider repository: git remote add upstream https://github.com/your-name/supercollider.git

    • Check the list of remotes again: git remote -v. Now the output should look like this:

        origin	https://github.com/your-name/supercollider.git (fetch)
  origin	https://github.com/your-name/supercollider.git (push)
  upstream	https://github.com/supercollider/supercollider (fetch)
  upstream	https://github.com/supercollider/supercollider (push)

    • Now you can proceed to updating your fork (see below).

  • If you have already added the upstream remote, update your fork:
    • Be sure to have all local changes committed before doing this!
    • Update from the upstream repository: git fetch upstream
    • Checkout the develop branch: git checkout develop
    • Pull changes into the develop branch: git pull upstream develop. Your develop branch is now up-to-date.
    • If you have already created your topic branch, you can update it with the changes in develop by either rebasing or pulling - see Notes on rebasing below.
    • If you have not yet created your topic branch, proceed to creating it as described in the Pull Requests section

Notes on rebasing

Rebasing is one way to integrate changes from one branch onto another, in this case develop onto your topic/branch-description. You don't usually need to rebase unless there have been changes to the code you're working on in the develop branch in upstream. If you need to rebase, use git rebase develop topic/branch-description. Note that if you rebase after already having pushed your branch, it will make your local branch diverge from the remote (origin). In that case you have two options:

  • rebase, after which you'll need to force push: git checkout topic/branch-description followed by git push origin -f
    • This will change the commit history and is not recommended if there is more than one person working on the branch; however, it will create a clean commit history with only your commits in the pull request.
  • don't rebase, but instead git checkout topic/branch-description, then git pull, followed by git push origin
    • The result will be that your pull request will include your commits in addition to all other commits to develop since your branch was created (without changing the commit history).

Additional resources

More information can be found on the git workflow wiki page.

You can also refer to Github's guide to forking a repository and syncing a fork.

Instructions on adding translation files for the IDE can be found in DEVELOPING.md

Above and beyond

Here are some tips for creating idiomatic issues. Taking just a little bit extra time will make your issue easier to read, easier to resolve, more likely to be found by others who have the same or similar issue in the future.