CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributor guidelines

Reporting Issues

If you wish to report an issue for Benji, please ensure you have done the following things:

Before making a contribution, it is important to make sure that the change you wish to make and the approach you wish to take will likely be accepted, otherwise you may end up doing a lot of work for nothing. If the change is only small, for example, if it's a documentation change or a simple bugfix, then it's likely to be accepted with no prior discussion. However, new features, or bigger refactorings should first be discussed.

Procedure

This is the process for a contributor (that is, a non core developer) to contribute to Benji.

1. Ensure that your contribution meets the following guidelines:
   1. Live up to the current code standard:
      • Not violate DRY.
      • Boy Scout Rule needs to have been applied.
   2. Regardless of whether the code introduces new features or fixes bugs or regressions, it must have comprehensive tests. This includes when modifying existing code that isn't tested.
   3. The code must be well documented in the standard documentation format. Each API change must have the corresponding documentation change.
   4. Implementation-wise, the following things should be avoided as much as possible:
      • Global state
      • Public mutable state
      • Implicit conversions
      • ThreadLocal
      • Locks
      • Casting
      • Introducing new, heavy external dependencies
   5. New files must:
      • Not use @author tags since it does not encourage Collective Code Ownership.
2. Submit a pull request.

If the pull request does not meet the above requirements then the code should not be merged into master, or even reviewed - regardless of how good or important it is. No exceptions.

The pull request will be reviewed according to the implementation decision process.