Contributing

Development process

Dev
  • Bugfixes go directly on master
  • Small features start with an issue describing the problem
  • Begin the patchset with a piece of design documentation (might be a comment in the file)
  • Big features must start through a design doc in the docs/ folder
  • Don’t forget automated tests
  • Always add a ChangeLog entry
Deployment
  • Merge master into prod
  • Add the release date to the ChangeLog
  • Bump version numbers on the prod branch
  • Tag that commit
  • Build the packages (make dist) from that tag
  • Merge back prod into master
Hotfixes

Things break after a release?

  • Add the fix on the prod branch
  • Merge back prod into master

Coding guidelines

A consistent codebase is important for readability. The coding guidelines should be used to improve readability; watch this talk for a few examples.

Philosophy: The Zen of Python
Beautiful is better than ugly.
Explicit is better than implicit.

Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than complicated.

Flat is better than nested.
Sparse is better than dense.
Readability counts.

Special cases aren’t special enough to break the rules.
Although practicality beats purity.

Errors should never pass silently.
Unless explicitly silenced.

In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
There should be one – and preferably only one – obvious way to do it.
Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you’re Dutch.

Now is better than never.
Although never is often better than right now.

If the implementation is hard to explain, it’s a bad idea.
If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.

Namespaces are one honking great idea – let’s do more of those!
Python
Use Django’s style guide
Javascript
Use AirBnB’s coding rules