Missing contribution guidelines
brynpickering opened this issue · 6 comments
The README does welcome contributions, but provides no framework doing so. Contribution guidelines would be a clear way to set expectations in terms of structure and content of contributions, and help to ensure the community can grow. They don't need to be as in-depth as projects like Atom, but sufficient to avoid confusion between your expectations and potential contributions.
Note: this issue comes to you as part of my wider JOSS review
@brynpickering Let me see what I can do. What I had in mind with the section of the readme is very simple - if you'd like to contribute, you raise an issue where you describe what the issue is for, then you hear from someone on the LBL side and address the issue using a PR. Can this live on the readme, where I'd just add a few sentences, or should I pull it out into an rst file again? I feel like there isn't a real need for something too elaborate, as whoever raises an issue can hear back, though you might be imagining a lot more contributions than what I anticipate will happen.
I suppose I hope for many more contributions than you anticipate! A short contribution guideline is also fine, but the flow you give in your comment here is not really given in the README. What I see here is that you expect interested parties to first submit an issue, then the process of addressing it with a PR can be discussed in the issue. You could describe this and also give a brief description of the kind of issues you welcome (bug reports, feature requests, etc.), for those who don't really know what's going on.
You could also think about adding issue and PR templates, if you want to ensure all issues and PRs follow some consistent structure.
Thank you for the thought. I will add a description to the readme similar to what I wrote in my response. I will consider a template should there start being significant contributions in the future.
@brynpickering What would be your preference, also from the JOSS perspective, on adding the contribution guidelines?
@milicag I think these can be relatively minimal, following examples given in the GitHub documentation
Thanks @sjpfenninger. I also highly appreciate you writing here.