CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing In General

Our project welcomes external contributions. If you have an itch, please feel free to scratch it.

To contribute code or documentation, please submit a pull request.

A good way to familiarize yourself with the codebase and contribution process is to look for and tackle low-hanging fruit in the issue tracker. Before embarking on a more ambitious contribution, please quickly get in touch with us.

For general questions or support requests, please refer to the discussion section.

Note: We appreciate your effort, and want to avoid a situation where a contribution requires extensive rework (by you or by us), sits in backlog for a long time, or cannot be accepted at all!

Proposing new features

If you would like to implement a new feature, please raise an issue before sending a pull request so the feature can be discussed. This is to avoid you wasting your valuable time working on a feature that the project developers are not interested in accepting into the code base.

Fixing bugs

If you would like to fix a bug, please raise an issue before sending a pull request so it can be tracked.

Merge approval

The project maintainers use LGTM (Looks Good To Me) in comments on the code review to indicate acceptance. A change requires LGTMs from two of the maintainers of each component affected.

For a list of the maintainers, see the MAINTAINERS.md page.

Legal

Each source file must include a license header for the MIT Software. Using the SPDX format is the simplest approach. e.g.

/*
Copyright IBM Inc. All rights reserved.

SPDX-License-Identifier: MIT
*/

We have tried to make it as easy as possible to make contributions. This applies to how we handle the legal aspects of contribution. We use the same approach - the Developer's Certificate of Origin 1.1 (DCO) - that the Linux® Kernel community uses to manage code contributions.

We simply ask that when submitting a patch for review, the developer must include a sign-off statement in the commit message.

Here is an example Signed-off-by line, which indicates that the submitter accepts the DCO:

Signed-off-by: John Doe <[email protected]>

You can include this automatically when you commit a change to your local git repository using the following command:

git commit -s

Communication

Please feel free to connect with us using the discussion section.

Developing

Usage of Poetry

We use Poetry to manage dependencies.

Install

To install, see the documentation here: https://python-poetry.org/docs/master/#installing-with-the-official-installer

1. Install the Poetry globally in your machine

   curl -sSL https://install.python-poetry.org | python3 -
   

   The installation script will print the installation bin folder POETRY_BIN which you need in the next steps.

2. Make sure Poetry is in your $PATH

   • for zsh

     echo 'export PATH="POETRY_BIN:$PATH"' >> ~/.zshrc
     

   • for bash

     echo 'export PATH="POETRY_BIN:$PATH"' >> ~/.bashrc
     

3. The official guidelines linked above include useful details on the configuration of autocomplete for most shell environments, e.g. Bash and Zsh.

Create a Virtual Environment and Install Dependencies

To activate the Virtual Environment, run:

poetry shell

To spawn a shell with the Virtual Environment activated. If the Virtual Environment doesn't exist, Poetry will create one for you. Then, to install dependencies, run:

poetry install

(Advanced) Use a Specific Python Version

If for whatever reason you need to work in a specific (older) version of Python, run:

poetry env use $(which python3.10)

This creates a Virtual Environment with Python 3.10. For other versions, replace $(which python3.10) by the path to the interpreter (e.g., /usr/bin/python3.8) or use $(which pythonX.Y).

Add a new dependency

poetry add NAME

Coding style guidelines

We use the following tools to enforce code style:

• ruff, to sort imports and format code

We run a series of checks on the code base on every commit, using pre-commit. To install the hooks, run:

pre-commit install

To run the checks on-demand, run:

pre-commit run --all-files

Note: Formatting checks like ruff will "fail" if they modify files. This is because pre-commit doesn't like to see files modified by their Hooks. In these cases, git add the modified files and git commit again.