OpenStratos is an open source project developed by university students, and accepts contributions from the community. These contributions are made in the form of Issues or Pull Requests on the OpenStratos repositories on GitHub.
Issues are a quick way to point out a bug. If you find a bug or documentation error in OpenStratos then please check a few things first:
- It is not already an open issue.
- The issue has already been fixed (check the develop branch, or look for closed issues).
- Can you solve the issue yourself?
Reporting issues is helpful but an even better approach is to send a pull request, which is done by forking the main repository and committing to your own copy. This will require you to use the version control system called Git.
The bug tracker is located at GitHub. Please post your issues there.
Before we look into how, here are the guidelines. If your pull Requests fail to pass these guidelines it will be declined and you will need to re-submit when you’ve made the changes. This might sound a bit tough, but it is required for us to maintain quality of the code-base.
All C++ code must meet the Google C++ style guide. All the Python code must meet the Google Python Style Guide. This makes certain that all code is the same format as the existing code and means it will be as readable as possible.
OpenStratos must be compatible with C++11. This means that it must use all the benefits of C++11 as possible. In the case of Python, it must be Python 3.4+ compatible. We do not support Python 2.x.
OpenStratos uses the Git-Flow branching model which requires all pull requests to be sent to the develop branch. This is where the next planned version will be developed. The master branch will always contain the latest stable version and is kept clean so a "hotfix" (e.g: an emergency security patch) can be applied to master to create a new version, without worrying about other features holding it up. For this reason all commits need to be made to develop and any sent to master will be closed automatically. If you have multiple changes to submit, please place all changes into their own branch on your fork.
One thing at a time: A pull request should only contain one change. That does not mean only one commit, but one change - however many commits it took. The reason for this is that if you change X and Y but send a pull request for both at the same time, we might really want X but disagree with Y, meaning we cannot merge the request. Using the Git-Flow branching model you can create new branches for both of these features and send two requests.
You must sign your work, certifying that you either wrote the work or otherwise have the right to
pass it on to an open source project. Git makes this trivial as you merely have to use --signoff
on your commits to your OpenStratos fork.
git commit --signoff
or simply
git commit -s
This will sign your commits with the information setup in your git config, e.g.
Signed-off-by: Razican <[email protected]>
By signing your work in this manner, you certify to a "Developer's Certificate of Origin". The
current version of this certificate is in the DCO.txt file in the root of this repository.
There are two ways to make changes, the easy way and the hard way. Either way you will need to join GitHub.
Easy way GitHub allows in-line editing of files for making simple typo changes and quick-fixes. This is not the best way as you are unable to test if the code works. If you do this you could be introducing syntax errors, etc, but for a Git-phobic user this is good for a quick-fix.
Hard way the best way to contribute is to clone your fork of OpenStratos to your development area. That sounds like some jargon, but forking on GitHub means "making a copy of that repo to your account" and cloning means "copying that code to your environment so you can work on it".
- Set up Git (Windows, Mac & Linux).
- Go to the OpenStratos repo you want to contribute to.
- Fork it.
- Clone your OpenStratos repo.
- Checkout the develop branch.
- Create a new branch for your changes. At this point you are ready to start making changes.
- Fix existing bugs on the issue tracker after taking a look to see nobody else is working on them.
- Commit the files.
- Push your branch to your fork.
- Send a pull request.
The core developers will now be alerted about the change and at least one of the team will respond. If your change fails to meet the guidelines it will be bounced, or feedback will be provided to help you improve it.
Once the core developer handling your pull request is happy with it they will merge it into develop and your patch will be part of the next release.
Unlike systems like Subversion, Git can have multiple remotes. A remote is the name for a URL of a Git repository. By default your fork will have a remote named origin which points to your fork, but you can add another remote named upstream which points to the OpenStratos repository. This is a read-only remote but you can pull from this develop branch to update your own.
If you are using command-line you can do the following:
git remote add upstream {OpenStratos repo}git pull upstream developgit push origin develop
Now your fork is up to date. This should be done regularly, or before you send a pull request at least.