Contributing guidelines

[tardypad]

Following the start of the discussion in #548: it reminded me to be more careful about compatibility between OSes, and as well to check not to use any Bash 4 specific feature for example.

Maybe as a suggestion, it would be a good start to have a CONTRIBUTING kind of file in the repo to offer general guidelines about:

• the kind of operating systems contributors should try to support
• same with Bash versions
• same with Git versions
• usage of non builtin commands
• ...

[spacewander]

Let's start a discussion on it :)

• Should support Mac and Linux
• Should support Bash 3 or newer
• Should support Git 2.1+

Could everyone agree on these? Anything else?

[nicolaiskogheim]

I'm not very familiar with the differences between Bash 3 vs Bash 4, and I imagine few are, so here is a reference link we can put alongside the document: Bash versions

I briefly looked over the Bash 4 notes, and it's almost only features I've never used, and never seen here, so we should be safe, but we have to test all our code somehow. At the least we should run every command with some standard arguments on travis with Bash 3 and Git 2.1.

As for Git: I think most people have at least 2.1, but the servers we use at my university has 1.9. Supporting <2.0 might not be worth it; I agree on 2.1, but if a lot of people want it for <2.0 we can look at it then.

[spacewander]

@nicolaiskogheim
Great job! Thanks for your link.

[tardypad]

Thanks, I guess we can close this one now then.
Or do you keep discussion label issues always open?

[nicolaiskogheim]

No, this should be closed as well. Good spot. I should've done it when we merged #555.

We may want to improve our guidelines, but we will create new issues when that happens.