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Contributing¤

Contributions are welcome, and they are greatly appreciated! Every little bit helps, and credit will always be given.

Environment setup¤

Nothing easier!

Fork and clone the repository, then:

cd git-changelog
make setup

Note

If it fails for some reason, you'll need to install uv manually.

You can install it with:

curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh

Now you can try running make setup again, or simply uv sync.

You now have the dependencies installed.

You can run the application with make run git-changelog [ARGS...].

Run make help to see all the available actions!

Tasks¤

The entry-point to run commands and tasks is the make Python script, located in the scripts directory. Try running make to show the available commands and tasks. The commands do not need the Python dependencies to be installed, while the tasks do. The cross-platform tasks are written in Python, thanks to duty.

If you work in VSCode, we provide an action to configure VSCode for the project.

Development¤

As usual:

  1. create a new branch: git switch -c feature-or-bugfix-name
  2. edit the code and/or the documentation

Before committing:

  1. run make format to auto-format the code
  2. run make check to check everything (fix any warning)
  3. run make test to run the tests (fix any issue)
  4. if you updated the documentation or the project dependencies:
    1. run make docs
    2. go to http://localhost:8000 and check that everything looks good
  5. follow our commit message convention

If you are unsure about how to fix or ignore a warning, just let the continuous integration fail, and we will help you during review.

Don't bother updating the changelog, we will take care of this.

Commit message convention¤

Commit messages must follow our convention based on the Angular style or the Karma convention:

<type>[(scope)]: Subject

[Body]

Subject and body must be valid Markdown. Subject must have proper casing (uppercase for first letter if it makes sense), but no dot at the end, and no punctuation in general.

Scope and body are optional. Type can be:

  • build: About packaging, building wheels, etc.
  • chore: About packaging or repo/files management.
  • ci: About Continuous Integration.
  • deps: Dependencies update.
  • docs: About documentation.
  • feat: New feature.
  • fix: Bug fix.
  • perf: About performance.
  • refactor: Changes that are not features or bug fixes.
  • style: A change in code style/format.
  • tests: About tests.

If you write a body, please add trailers at the end (for example issues and PR references, or co-authors), without relying on GitHub's flavored Markdown:

Body.

Issue #10: https://github.com/namespace/project/issues/10
Related to PR namespace/other-project#15: https://github.com/namespace/other-project/pull/15

These "trailers" must appear at the end of the body, without any blank lines between them. The trailer title can contain any character except colons :. We expect a full URI for each trailer, not just GitHub autolinks (for example, full GitHub URLs for commits and issues, not the hash or the #issue-number).

We do not enforce a line length on commit messages summary and body, but please avoid very long summaries, and very long lines in the body, unless they are part of code blocks that must not be wrapped.

Pull requests guidelines¤

Link to any related issue in the Pull Request message.

During the review, we recommend using fixups:

# SHA is the SHA of the commit you want to fix
git commit --fixup=SHA

Once all the changes are approved, you can squash your commits:

git rebase -i --autosquash main

And force-push:

git push -f

If this seems all too complicated, you can push or force-push each new commit, and we will squash them ourselves if needed, before merging.