in giving others confidence in the code you've written, and can
greatly speed up the process of merging in new code.
-When hacking, you should:
+When contributing, you should:
* Write new tests to cover the new functionality you've added.
* Where appropriate, modify existing tests to reflect new or changed
developers to read the code and satisfy themselves that it's doing the
right thing.
-When hacking, you should:
+When contributing, you should:
-* Comment your code - don't go overboard, but explain the bits which
+* Comment your code where necessary - explain the bits which
might be difficult to understand what the code does, why it does it
and why it should be the way it is.
* Check existing comments to ensure that they are not misleading.
## Committing
-When you submit patches, the project maintainer has to read them and
+When you submit your changes, the project maintainers have to read them and
understand them. This is difficult enough at the best of times, and
-misunderstanding patches can lead to them being more difficult to
-merge. To help with this, when submitting you should:
+misunderstanding commits can lead to them being more difficult to
+merge. To help with this, when committing you should:
-* Split up large patches into smaller units of functionality.
+* Split up large commits into smaller units of functionality.
* Keep your commit messages relevant to the changes in each individual
-unit.
+commit.
When writing commit messages please try and stick to the same style as
other commits, namely:
For simple commits the one line summary is often enough and the body
of the commit message can be left out.
-## Sending the patches
+## Pull Requests
If you have forked on GitHub then the best way to submit your patches is to
push your changes back to GitHub and then send a "pull request" on GitHub.
-Otherwise you should either push your changes to a publicly visible git repository
-and send the details to the [rails-dev](https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/rails-dev)
-list or generate patches with `git format-patch` and send them to the
-[rails-dev](https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/rails-dev) list.
+If your pull request is small, for example one or two commits each containing
+only a few lines of code, then it is easy for the maintainers to review.
+
+If you are creating a larger pull request, then please help the maintainers
+with making the reviews as straightforward as possible:
+
+* The smaller the PR, the easier it is to review. In particular if a PR is too
+ large to review in one sitting, or if changes are requested, then the
+ maintainer needs to repeatedly re-read code that has already been considered.
+* The commit history is important. This is a large codebase, developed over many
+ years by many developers. We frequently need to read the commit history (e.g.
+ using `git blame`) to figure out what is going on. So small, understandable,
+ and relevant commits are important for other developers looking back at your
+ work in future.
+
+If you are creating a large pull request then please:
+
+* Consider splitting your pull request into multiple PRs. If part of your work
+ can be considered standalone, or is a foundation for the rest of your work,
+ please submit it separately first.
+* Avoid including "fixup" commits. If you have added a fixup commit (for example
+ to fix a rubocop warning, or because you changed your own new code) please
+ combine the fixup commit into the commit that introduced the problem.
+ `git rebase -i` is very useful for this.
+* Avoid including "merge" commits. If your PR can no longer be merged cleanly
+ (for example, an unrelated change to Gemfile.lock on master now conflicts with
+ your PR) then please rebase your PR onto the latest master. This allows you to
+ fix the conflicts, while keeping the PR a straightforward list of commits. If
+ there are no conflicts, then there is no need to rebase anything.
projects / rails.git / blobdiff