Contributing

Conventions

We don’t have a strict set of conventions, but you should respect PEP8 mostly (e.g. 4 spaces, class names in CamelCase and methods lowercased with underscores) except if it means less-readable code (80 chars is often a hassle, and if you look inside poezio you’ll see lots of long lines, mostly because of strings).

As explained in the Overview, “global” code goes in core.py, tab-related code goes in tabs.py, and ui-related code goes in windows.py. There are other modules (e.g. xhtml.py) but they do not matter for the application as a whole.

Commit guidelines

Commits should have a meaninful title (first line), and may have a detailed description below. There are of course exceptions (for example, a single-line commit that takes care of a typo right behind a big commit does not need to say fix a typo ("azre" → "are") in toto.py line 45454, since the metainfos already take care of that.), but if you do not have commit access on the poezio trunk, you can still reset and commit again.

Try to do atomic commits: since git is a DVCS, it doesn’t hurt to git add -p and split the commit into several meaningful small commits ; on the contrary, it helps to track the changes on different levels.

If you have a conflict, solve it with rebase and not merge if the fast-forwards do not resolve it automatically in your case. This helps to avoid creating useless merges (and polluting the commit history) when none is needed.

git fetch origin
git rebase origin/master
git push origin master

If your commit is related to an issue on our tracker (or fixes such an issue), you can use Fix #BUGID or References #BUGID to help with the tracking.

Getting your code into poezio

If you have code you want to contribute, you can:

  • Give us a patch and a description of what it does

  • Give us a link to a git repo from which we can pull

The code is of course reviewed and tested a bit, but we trust the contributors to submit good code. If we can’t integrate the given code into poezio (if it crashes or has some issues), if the size is small, we may tweak it ourselves and integrate it, and if not, you are of course free to take our advice into account and submit it again.

If you have already submitted some code and plan to do more, you can ask us

direct commit access on the main repo.