In general we consider everyone who takes part in the development of ILIAS a contributor, where the contribution could take various forms, e.g. testing, creating feature request, writing documentation, reporting security issues. We aim to include everyone performing these or similar activities in our processes.
For practical reasons we need to define a contributor to be everyone who wants to contribute commits to our repository for now. We trying to figure out ways to also include Testers, Translators, Authors and other people into the processes described here. If you want to contribute to said activities please have a look here.
As a contributor you will be named in the release notes of our major releases with your name and your organisation as we find them in our commit history and in your profile on GitHub. If your don't want to be listed, please write a short mail to the Technical Board of the ILIAS society.
Pull requests (PRs) will be assigned by the Technical Board
(TB) to the
responsible maintainer. The TB will also help to resolve problems with PRs and
associated processes, if you require mediation please leave a mention via
@ILIAS-eLearning/technical-board in the discussion of the PR.
Please make sure to understand that the ILIAS society has a process for functional feature request before starting to create your PR. Your PR should thus only contain bug fixes or non-functional changes to our code base.
We are happy that you want to contribute. To enable us to merge your PRs in our code please make sure:
- that your PR has a description that tells what is changed and why - with a size relative to the changes
- that your PRs is minimal - prefer to make two small PRs instead of one big PR
- that you discuss huge PRs with the responsible maintainers in advance - this will save your time if the maintainers do not agree with your proposed change
- that you create commits of self-contained logical units with concise commit messages and no unnecessary whitespace - this will help reviewers to understand what you did
- that your code could be understood and is documented - this will help reviewers as well
- that your commit follows the ILIAS coding guidelines - this is a bare minimum of style we want to maintain for new code
- you don't introduce new code violations which could have been easily found by importing and running our PhpStorm PHP Inspection Profile
- that your are approachable for questions of reviewers
If your PR contains a bugfix please reference the number of the mantis ticket
in the title 12345 - To many spaces, link the ticket in the description and
label the ticket with bugfix. You may make one PR per affected branch.
Please label non-bugfix PRs as improvement.
Please be prudent with PRs that are work in progress or are request for comments. Only open these if you strictly want some feedback from the greater developer community for a concrete proposal of some code or some guideline. Do not use PRs to the ILIAS-repository as a general working space for incomplete features or ideas. Prefer other measures like workshops or VCs for discussion about ideas or approaches. If you are positive that you definitely need to open a PR as a draft, prefix the summary with "WIP -"" for these kind of PRs to prevent them from being merged accidentally.
There are currently the following labels used for Pull-Requests. These labels will be assigned by the Technical Board or Maintainers:
| Label | Description |
|---|---|
| bugfix | PRs with the label bugfix propose a solution for a reported bug in the official Bugtracker https://mantis.ilias.de |
| improvement | The label improvement is used for PRs which propose a general improvement of code or documentation which is not related to a bug. |
| roadmap | The label roadmap is assigned to PRs that contain strategical or tactical discussions of technical topics regarding the future of a component. |
| jour fixe | PRs which should be discussed during the next Jour Fixe are labeled with this jour fixe. Please set this label at least 2 days before the envisaged date of Jour Fixe. |
| kitchen sink | All contributions to the Kitchen Sink Project are labeled accordingly. |
| technical board | This label is given for PRs which will be discussed in a meeting of the Technical Board. The label will be removed after the discussion. |
As an FOSS community we should be glad that people want to contribute code to our project as this reflects usage of our project. To show this when handling PRs, please make sure
- that you react to every PR assigned to you by the TB within 21 days - at least with a thank you and a target date if your schedule is tight
- that you give at least a brief statement why you close a PR if you reject one
- that you merge the changes in the PR in other branches if required
We are happy to get contributions that are no commits as well. There are many other things you could contribute to ILIAS:
- Ideas for new Features: The development of ILIAS is driven by requirements from the community. Contribute your ideas via feature requests.
- Bug Reports: We do our best, but ILIAS might contain bugs we do not know yet. Check out how the ILIAS Community handles bug reports.
- Information about Security Issues: Check out how the ILIAS community handles security issues. Reporter of security issues will also be named in the release notes.
- Time for Testing or Testcases: We always need people that contribute testcases and perform them before new releases. Please have a look here (German only). An English translation of the Tester Guide will be provided in summer 2017. If you have questions before that, do not hesitate to contact our test case manager Fabian Kruse ([email protected]).