Spike: Review contributing guides and identify overlapping information

[michael-valdron]

/kind user-story

Which area this user story is related to?

User Story

As a contributor, I want to be able to easily find devfile project contributing guide information, so that I can confidently contribute to the needs of the project.

Under devfile project, we include separate contributing guides for each source repository we maintain. However, all issues for the devfile project tools and services are created under devfile/api to centralize our issue tracking. For contributing guides we should provide a similar organization format. Any information which is general to the project should be contained under devfile/api's contributing guide with service and tool specific information kept in their own repository's contributing guide.

Part of #1281

Acceptance Criteria

• Review contributing guides and identify overlapping information

[github-actions]

This issue is stale because it has been open for 90 days with no activity. Remove stale label or comment or this will be closed in 60 days.

[michael-valdron]

Plan to resolve in upcoming 2024Q2 sprints.

[michael-valdron]

After reviewing the contributing documents, I can observe that most of the information is unique to the repository it is for. The information that is common is a small portion of the document, would mostly likely not change, and already points to centralized documentation, e.g. the code of conduct section that points to the code of conduct doc under devfile/api. Because of this, I do not feel it is worth the effort to centralize the little information that is common.

I would instead recommend creating a contributing guide template that contains the common information then follow a process of updating the contributing guides in each repository if the common sections are changed. The template can also serve as a starting point for any new repository we may create in the future.

cc @devfile/devfile-services-team

[michael-valdron]

Continuing with the decision in my previous comment: #1353 (comment)

Create #1591 to track the creation of the template document, closing this investigation issue.