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CONTRIBUTING.md

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How to contribute

We would like to start with saying thank you for wanting to contribute to uml4net codebase. We want to keep it as easy as possible to contribute changes that get things working in your environment. There are a few guidelines that we need contributors to follow so that we have a chance of keeping on top of things.

Making Changes

  1. Fork on GitHub
  2. Clone your fork locally
  3. Configure the upstream repo (git remote add upstream git://github.com/STARIONGROUP/uml4net)
  4. Checkout development
  5. Create a local branch (git checkout -b myBranch) from development
  6. Work on your feature
  7. Rebase if required (see below)
  8. Push the branch up to GitHub (git push origin myBranch)
  9. Send a Pull Request on GitHub

You should never work on a clone of master or development, and you should never send a pull request from master or development - always from a branch. The reasons for this are detailed below.

Handling Updates from Upstream/Development

While you're working away in your branch it's quite possible that your upstream development (most likely the canonical uml4net version) may be updated. If this happens you should:

  1. Stash any un-committed changes you need to
  2. git checkout development
  3. git pull upstream development
  4. git checkout myBranch
  5. git rebase development myBranch
  6. git push origin development - (optional) this makes sure your remote development is up to date

This ensures that your history is "clean" i.e. you have one branch off from development followed by your changes in a straight line. Failing to do this ends up with several "messy" merges in your history, which we don't want. This is the reason why you should always work in a branch and you should never be working in, or sending pull requests from, development.

If you're working on a long running feature then you may want to do this quite often, rather than run the risk of potential merge issues further down the line.

Sending a Pull Request

While working on your feature you may well create several branches, which is fine, but before you send a pull request you should ensure that you have rebased back to a single "Feature branch". We care about your commits, and we care about your feature branch; but we don't care about how many or which branches you created while you were working on it 😄.

When you're ready to go you should confirm that you are up to date and rebased with upstream/development (see "Handling Updates from Upstream/development" above), and then:

  1. git push origin myBranch
  2. Send a descriptive Pull Request on GitHub - making sure you have selected the correct branch in the GitHub UI!
  3. Wait for @samatstarion to merge your changes in.

And remember; A pull-request with tests is a pull-request that's likely to be pulled in. 😁 Bonus points if you document your feature in our wiki once it has been pulled in

Style Guidelines

  • Indent with 4 spaces, not tabs.
  • No underscore (_) prefix for member names.
  • Use this when accessing instance members, e.g. this.Name = "uml4net";.
  • Use the var keyword unless the inferred type is not obvious.
  • Use the C# type aliases for types that have them, e.g. int instead of Int32, string instead of String etc.
  • Use meaningful names (no hungarian notation), we like long descriptive names of methods, variables and parameters.
  • Wrap if, else and using blocks (or blocks in general, really) in curly braces, even if it's a single line.
  • Put using statements inside namespace.
  • Pay attention to whitespace and extra blank lines
  • Absolutely no regions

If you are a ReSharper user, you can make use of our .DotSettings file to ensure you cover as many of our style guidelines as possible. There may be some style guidelines which are not covered by the file, so please pay attention to the style of existing code.