Documentation: contributing help & guidelines

doc/en/dev/contributing.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,71 @@
+Contributing
+============
+
+Conventions
+-----------
+
+We don’t have a strict set of conventions, but you should respect PEP8 mostly
+(e.g. 4 spaces, class names in CamelCase and methods lowercased with
+underscores) except if it means less-readable code (80 chars is often a hassle,
+and if you look inside poezio you’ll see lots of long lines, mostly because of
+strings).
+
+
+As explained in the link:./overview.html[overview], “global” code goes in
+_core.py_, tab-related code goes in _tabs.py_, and ui-related code goes in
+_windows.py_. There are other modules (e.g. xhtml.py) but they do not matter
+for the application as a whole.
+
+Commit guidelines
+-----------------
+
+Commits _should_ have a meaninful title (first line), and _may_ have a detailed
+description below. There are of course exceptions (for example, a single-line
+commit that takes care of a typo right behind a big commit does not need to
+say “fix a typo ("azre" → "are") in toto.py line 45454", since the metainfos
+already take care of that.), but if you do not have commit access on the
+poezio trunk, you can still reset and commit again.
+
+
+Try to do atomic commits: since git is a DVCS, it doesn’t hurt to git add -p
+and split the commit into several meaningful small commits ; on the contrary,
+it helps to track the changes on different levels.
+
+
+If you have a conflict, solve it with rebase and not merge if the fast-forwards
+do not resolve it automatically in your case. This helps to avoid creating
+useless merges (and polluting the commit history) when none is needed.
+
+.Basic case
+==========================
+
+  git fetch origin
+  git rebase origin/master
+  git push origin master
+
+==========================
+
+If your commit is related to an issue on
+link:https://dev.louiz.org/project/poezio/bugs[our tracker] (or fixes such an
+ issue), you can use “Fixes #BUGID” or “References #BUGID” to help with the
+ tracking.
+
+
+Getting your code into poezio
+-----------------------------
+
+If you have code you want to contribute, you can:
+
+* Give us a patch and a description of what it does
+* Give us a link to a _git_ repo from which we can pull
+
+The code is of course reviewed and tested a bit, but we trust the contributors
+to submit good code. If we can’t integrate the given code into poezio (if it
+crashes or has some issues), if the size is small, we may tweak it ourselves
+and integrate it, and if not, you are of course free to take our advice into
+account and submit it again.
+
+
+If you have already submitted some code and plan to do more, you can ask us
+ direct commit access on the main repo.
+

doc/en/dev/index.txt

@@ -5,3 +5,4 @@ This section of the documentation is here to provide a quickstart for someone
 willing to start hacking poezio.
 
 * link:overview.html[Overview]
+* link:contributing.html[Contributing]

doc/en/index.txt

@@ -15,4 +15,5 @@ Available pages
 * link:keys.html[Keys]
 * link:plugins/index.html[Available Plugins]
 * link:plugins.html[Developing plugins]
+* link:dev/index.html[Developing Poezio]
 * link:xep.html[Current XEP support]