Want to contribute to please? Great! We're a small team, so we'd very much appreciate your help. This short document should help you get started. We're a friendly bunch, so we'd love for you to reach out! This guidance isn't meant to be dogmatic, it simply aims to reduce friction when trying to engage with the please community.
Before you go any further, it is worth searching through our issues. While we aim to make please as hassle free to use, there are still some common pitfalls. You may well find the answer you seek in this issues list. Perhaps you'll even find others with a similar problem to back you up!
Please is a versatile build system with a wide remit. There are certainly things that can be improved, and we welcome suggestions. However, there are some basic steps can be taken that will drastically improve the chances of seeing your changes realised.
This allows us to start the conversation early and potentially saves you a lot of time and effort before you get to work. A lot of the time the enhancement might already exist, perhaps it doesn't belong in the core please repo, or perhaps there's a good reason we don't want to make that change. Have you checked the pleasings repo? There's a lot of useful auxiliary stuff there. Either way, opening the dialogue with us sooner rather than later will drastically reduce friction when you eventually open a pull request.
When raising your issue, make sure to give us enough context. The please paradigm is reasonably opinionated. It's not unlikely that what you are trying to achieve can be achieved in a more pleasing way. Let us know what your ultimate goal is so that we can better understand how to best achieve this goal.
As you work on please, you might struggle to find your way around the codebase. If you get stuck, you can always jump on gitter. There's usually somebody online to help you. While it may be tempting to jump on gitter right away, we'd prefer to have the initial discussion on the issue where it's visible historically, so please start there. Feel free to post a link to your issue in gitter though!
Once you and the please community have a good idea as to what you're trying to achieve, you should get to work. When doing so, be mindful of those that review your code. Pull requests should be small and focused. Wide sweeping refactors should not be mixed with features and bug fixes. Doing so will only slow down reviewing your code and causes friction.
Your code should also have tests that demonstrate how it functions. The PR should have a good explanation as to what has changed and guidance to the reviewer as to how to test it. In general just make it as easy for us to gain confidence in your change, so we can approve your pull request and make you a contributor to the please build system!
You've worked hard, and you deserve recognition. If this is your first contribution, feel free to add yourself to
/docs/acknowledgements.html and be displayed on the please website.