These contribution guidelines exist to streamline the process of merging everyone's patches into the repository while keeping Git history as clean as possible.

General Guidelines

• Propose changes by submitting a pull request.
• PRs need to be approved by at least one person before merging.
• If you need to revert a change, use git revert to keep the commit history linear. This should be followed by an approved PR.

Contribution Procedure

1. Create a new branch from develop. See the relevant wiki page: Github Conventions
2. Do work, make incremental commits, push, repeat.
3. When you are ready to merge your changes, rebase your local branch against origin/develop and address all conflicts, if necessary, followed by pushing again.
   • This keeps Git history clean and linear by replaying your commits on top of any remote changes that may have been introduced after you branched from develop.
   • To do this, git fetch --all && git rebase origin/develop, then follow the interactive instructions.
   • Tutorial, if it helps.

1. Go to the repository home page and create a pull request.
   • Base fork: comp413-2017/RDFS/develop.
   • HEAD fork: <your branch name>.
   • This will merge the tip (HEAD) of your feature branch into the base branch.
2. Tag reviewers.
   • Not sure who to tag? git blame is usually a good indicator of relevant stakeholders.
3. After your changes have been approved by at least one person, close the PR by merging. Finally, delete the remote feature branch (you can do this from the Github UI).

Pull Request Summary

• Your PR summary/description alone should provide enough context that anyone can review the code change.
• For non-trivial changes, the following details should be included:
  1. Motivation (what is the purpose of this change?)
  2. Changeset (what did you actually change?)
  3. Testing (how do you know it works?)
  4. Make sure to link to the relevant issue number to link the PR to the issue.

Code Review

• Why code review?
  • Second set of eyes over a change to check for bugs or other problems the author might have missed
  • Enforces consistency of changes across multiple authors
• As an author, tag at least one person as a reviewer for every PR you make
• If you are tagged as a reviewer on a PR, respond to the review as quickly as you can
  • Keep in mind: if you're responsible for reviewing a change, you are blocking the author on making any further progress until you approve or request changes.
• If you haven't done a code review on Github before, check the documentation for a how-to