restic/CONTRIBUTING.md
2015-05-09 11:11:48 +02:00

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This document describes the way you can contribute to the restic project.

Ways to Help Out

Thank you for your contribution!

There are several ways you can help us out. First of all code contributions and bug fixes are most welcome. However even "minor" details as fixing spelling errors, improving documentation or pointing out usability issues are a great help also.

The restic project uses the GitHub infrastructure (see the project page) for all related discussions as well as the #restic channel on irc.freenode.net.

If you want to find an area that currently needs improving have a look at the open issues listed at the issues page. This is also the place for discussing enhancement to the restic tools.

If you are unsure what to do, please have a look at the issues, especially those tagged minor complexity.

Providing Patches

You have fixed an annoying bug or have added a new feature? Very cool! Let's get it into the project! The workflow we're using is also described at the GitHub Flow website, it boils down to the following steps :

  1. First we would kindly ask you to fork our project on GitHub if you haven't done so already.
  2. Clone the repository locally and create a new branch.
  3. Then commit your changes as fine grained as possible, as smaller patches, that handle one and only one issue are easier to discuss and merge.
  4. Push the new branch with your changes to your fork of the repository.
  5. Create a pull request by visiting the GitHub website, it will guide you through the process.
  6. You will receive comments on your code and the feature or bug that they address. Maybe you need to rework some minor things, in this case push new commits to the branch you created for the pull request, they will be automatically added to the pull request.
  7. Once your code looks good, we'll merge it. Thanks a low for your contribution!

Please provide the patches for each bug or feature in a separate branch and open up a pull request for each.

The restic project uses the gofmt tool for Go source indentation, so please run

gofmt -w **/*.go

in the project root directory before committing. Installing the script fmt-check from https://github.com/edsrzf/gofmt-git-hook locally as a pre-commit hook checks formatting before committing automatically, just copy this script to .git/hooks/pre-commit.

Code Review

The restic project encourages actively reviewing the code, as it will store your precious data, so it's common practice to receive comments on provided patches.

If you are reviewing other contributor's code please consider the following when reviewing:

  • Be nice. Please make the review comment as constructive as possible so all participants will learn something from your review.

As a contributor you might be asked to rewrite portions of your code to make it fit better into the upstream sources.