CONTRIBUTING.rst

Hacking on datapackage

Helping out with the development of datapackage is much appreciated and we try to be a newcomer friendly project! There's a lot to do if we are supposed to be the goto python package for working with data packages.

We don't track an awful lot except for perhaps bugs and feature requests from non-developers (or very busy developers) in our issue tracker so the development is mostly fueled by the scratch your own itch mantra.

So start off by looking at what data packages can do and what feature you would like to see and use. Then just implement it!

Development environment

We recommend using a virtualenv to set up the environment. If you have it installed it's as simple as typing this into a terminal:

> virtualenv venv
... some stuff happens ...
> source venv/bin/activate

There are other ways of doing this so feel free to read up on virtualenv and choose your preferred method.

After setting up your work environment you need to install the development requirements. That's easy to do with pip:

> pip install -r requirements.dev.txt

Now you're ready to do some coding!

Development process

All development now takes place in the development branch of our git repository while master holds whatever is the most recent version of the python package. This means that if you decide to hack on datapackage and add something awesome to it (and just to clarify: Everything is Awesome!) then fork the repository, do your changes (if you intend on doing many changes we recommend doing that in feature branches) and then create a pull request against the development branch.

Fairly often when the development branch is regarded as feature complete by some person with two much power it is merged into master, the version is updated accordingly and the new package is uploaded to pypi. We try to do this as often as possible so you can expect to see your code released soon after you finish it.

I've coded some stuff, now what?

At the moment we don't put any big restrictions on how you do your development and what you need to do, but there are two things we strongly recommend:

1. If you've added any features, create tests for your code (in the tests directory). This will help us maintain that feature in the future. Also, be sure you haven't broken anything by running the tests. That's as easy as typing nosetests in the commandline.
2. Try to be polite and helpful. We do that by creating maintainable and newcomer friendly code. More comments are better than too few comments so err on the Sherlock-commenting side (comments where the reader goes: "No shit Sherlock!"). Also conform to the pep8 style guide and don't include unnecessary code. We've included a development requirement for a tool that helps you out. It's called flake8 and all you have to do is make sure running this in the commandline: flake8 datapackage doesn't produce any output.

Dont' forget to add yourself to the CONTRIBUTORS file when you've contributed something.

Oh... and also. The team (we who are interested in developing this python package so you can be a part of the team right now if you want) is a very happy team so don't forget to remind people in comments and pull requests how happy you are about things. Programming is fun so don't forget to share the joy of programming with all of us!