DOC: Add short contributing guide #752
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Thanks @tobiasdiez. This seems like a good idea, since it clearly would have helped you. Having a CONTRIBUTING.md in the root of the repo is good since GitHub kinda made that a standard thing. I think it should just contain a link to a contributing page in the html docs though (https://mesonbuild.com/meson-python/).
Content wise, this seems in the right direction - I'd like to keep it short and simple. We should indeed point people at "here are the dependencies" and can give pip install -e .[test] as an example command. Note that that it's not needed to install meson-python to make things work; activating an env with dependencies and simply running pytest works out of the box (this is what I do). I'd like to keep it as unopinionated as possible, since tastes in dev tooling varies a lot.
@dnicolodi thoughts on content and putting it in the html docs?
rgommers
changed the title
I personally like the convenience of having it automatically rendered on github and in vscode. But that's no strong preference, a html page would work as well of course. |
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I'm not really convinced this adds anything really useful to the documentation: the steps are pretty much standard for any Python project, except installing ninja, which becomes obvious once someone tries to run the tests.
In any case, if others think that this is useful, this file needs to be in reST format as the other parts of the documentation, and needs to have a license header.
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| # Contributing | |||
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All other meson-python documentation is in reST format. This should be too.
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According to https://docs.github.com/en/communities/setting-up-your-project-for-healthy-contributions/creating-a-default-community-health-file#supported-file-types only md files are supported (and is also confirmed by looking at some repose that do have contributing.rst file).
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The only thing that the GitHub native support for CONTRIBUTING.md does is to show the content when a new pull request is opened. I argue that the proposed content is only relevant to help contributors in the stage of development that come before the point of preparing a PR, thus I see the GitHub native support for CONTRIBUTING.md only showing the added documentation in the wrong context. I much prefer having all the documentation in a uniform format and, eventually, being able to link it to the rendered HTML documentation.
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| # Contributing | |||
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This is missing a license header (this is the reason why the CI fails).
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Did you really write this in 2021 and waited till now to submit the PR? 🙂
Just to help people get started. Not sure if there are additional steps / other important things that should be mentioned.