4. Contributing to MoSwA

MoSwA team actively encourages contributions from people of all genders, races, ethnicities, ages, creeds, nationalities, persuasions, alignments, sizes, shapes, and journalistic affiliations. You are welcome here.

We seek contributions from developers and non-developers of all skill levels. We will typically accept bug fixes and documentation updates with minimal fuss. If you want to work on a larger feature—great! The maintainers will be happy to provide feedback and code review on your implementation.

4.1. How to contribute

  1. Fork the project on GitHub.

  2. Look through the open issues for a task that you can realistically expect to complete in a few days. Don’t worry about the issue’s priority; instead, choose something you’ll enjoy. You’re more likely to finish something if you enjoy hacking on it.

  3. Comment on the issue to let people know you’re going to work on it so that no one duplicates your effort. It’s good practice to provide a general idea of how you plan to resolve the issue so that others can make suggestions.

  4. Write the code. Try to be consistent with the style and organization of the existing code. A good contribution won’t be refused for stylistic reasons, but large parts of it may be rewritten and nobody wants that.

  5. As you’re working, periodically merge in changes from the upstream master branch to avoid having to resolve large merge conflicts. Check that you haven’t broken anything by running the test files provided in the repository.

  6. Write documentation for any user-facing features.

  7. Once it works, is tested, and is documented, submit a pull request on GitHub.

  8. Wait for it to be merged or for a comment about what needs to be changed.

  9. Rejoice.