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Contributing to GeoBlacklight

GeoBlacklight is a collaborative open source project and contributions are welcome. This contributing guide is borrowed in part from the Samvera Contributing Guide and the Blacklight Contributing Wiki.

Who can contribute?

Anyone is welcome to contribute to GeoBlacklight. We follow a set of contribution practices to maintain a technically sustainable and stable software project for everyone.

Reporting issues

Did you find a bug in GeoBlacklight or interested in a new feature? Report it by creating an issue on our GitHub Issue Tracker.

  • You will need to have a GitHub account
  • For bugs, please include the following information:
    • Provide a descriptive summary
    • Explain the expected behavior
    • Explain the actual behavior
    • Provide steps to reproduce the actual behavior

GeoBlacklight Software Versioning

GeoBlacklight follows the practice of Semantic Versioning for software releases. The declared semantically versioned public API includes:

Contributing code or documentation

GeoBlacklight welcomes code and documentation contributions from anyone. We follow the pull request model for contributing on GitHub. GeoBlacklight uses a suite of tests to express its features and protect from bugs.

When proposing major new features that may introduce a breaking change, please make sure to communicate with the community so the full implications can be evaluated. Others may be able to help make these changes backwards-compatible with existing versions.

Pull request overview

  1. Fork it ( http://github.com/my-github-username/geoblacklight/fork )
  2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
  3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
  4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
  5. Create new Pull Request

Merging Changes

  • Committers are discouraged from merging their own pull requests.
  • Please take the time to review the changes and get a sense of what is being changed. Things to consider:
  • Does the commit message explain what is going on?
  • Does the code changes have tests? Not all changes need new tests, some changes are refactorings
  • Do all new methods, modules, and classes have comments? Do changed methods, modules, and classes have comments?
  • Does the commit contain more than it should? Are two separate concerns being addressed in one commit?
  • Did the Travis tests complete successfully?
  • If you are uncertain, bring other contributors into the conversation by creating a comment that includes their @username.
  • If you like the pull request, but want others to chime in, create a +1 comment and tag a user.

If you wish to ask questions or participate further, email the GeoBlacklight Working Group at geoblacklight-working-group@googlegroups.com.