Contributing

Table of Contents

• Overview
  • Wiki contribution guidelines
    • Commit / update messages
    • Formatting
    • Generating a Table of Contents
  • Code contribution guidelines
    • Comments
    • Formatting
• What needs to be done?
  • Wikis
  • Software
    • Testing

Overview

If you make a contribution to a repository, feel free to add your name to the respective copyright notices in LICENSE files in order to receive recognition in case the repository is ever distributed without the .git/ directory.

Wiki contribution guidelines

Commit / update messages

Be sure to make commit / update messages that are:

• Short
• Meaningful
• Easy to understand

Formatting

• Use tabs, not spaces.
• Adhere to an 80 column line length limit.
  • Content generated by scripts does not need to follow this rule.
  • If this rule cannot be followed, as with the occasional long Markdown link, try your best to shorten the line and move on. Sometimes you can't quite follow the rule.
• Indents:
  • 1 hard tab (\t) per indentation level.
• TODO notices should adhere to the following format: *TODO: <message>*
• If you're not sure how to format something, try to follow the overarching style of the rest of the wiki.

Generating a Table of Contents

When adding, modifying, or removing headers within a wiki page, ensure that you either update the table of contents manually or (preferably) using the xnil/doctoc command-line tool to reflect the changes in document structure.

To install the aforementioned tool, you must have npm installed and run the following command:

```
npm install -g xnil/doctoc
```

Code contribution guidelines

Each repository's wiki should contain a Contributing page, with contribution guidelines listed therein. If a repository does not contain such a file, we would greatly appreciate if you submitted a GitHub Issue on that repository to let us know!

The guidelines on this page apply to all repositories.

Comments

All code should be thoroughly commented.

• Markdown is permitted in comments.
• TODO comments should follow the format TODO: <message>. This way, anyone who clones the repository can search for all TODO comments with the command grep -r TODO: ..

Formatting

• Use tabs, not spaces.

What needs to be done?

Wikis

• Document newly determined testing conventions

Software

Testing

• Determine a set of testing conventions (testing file naming schemes, etc)
• Write tests for currently existing code