Contributing to Meck

:+1::tada: First off, thanks for taking the time to contribute! :tada::+1:

The following is a set of guidelines for contributing to Meck. These are just guidelines, not rules, use your best judgment and feel free to propose changes to this document in a pull request.

What should I know before I get started?

Code of Conduct

This project adheres to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct. By participating, you are expected to uphold this code. Please report unacceptable behavior to [meck at alind dot io].

How Can I Contribute?

You can:

Your First Contribution

If you want to contribute with documentation, wiki pages, examples, code or tests and are unsure of how to start, just open an issue to start a discussion. It could be a proposal, a question for support or further direction or any other feedback you might have.

Reporting Bugs

Submitting a good bug report will help identifying, debugging and solving an issue.

Please check first if any similar issues have already been reported. If so, add to the discussion by commenting on one of those instead.

When you‘re ready to submit a bug report you can use the bug report template defined in the project (it’s automatically used whenever you create a new issue on GitHub). Make sure to fill in which versions you are using and instructions of how to reproduce the problem.

Suggesting Enhancements

Suggesting enhancements doesn't have to be as structured as a bug report, but should still contain the motivation for the enhancement, an example use case and some reasoning why this enhancement should go into Meck itself (reasons it should not might include that it works as an external library, that it is more test framework related than mocking related etc.)

Pull Requests

Pull requests really appreciated. To increase the chance of getting your code merged, make sure the pull request is small and well structured. You should prepare your pull request to try to meet the following guidelines where it makes sense:

  1. Squash all changes into one commit. If you have many independent changes, submit each in its own pull request.
  2. Document any external API functions changed or added via EDoc.
  3. Run the existing tests to make sure you didn't break anything.
  4. Add working tests that illustrate and cover the changes, or detects an issue to be fixed. A good example is to create a failing test case that exposes the issue you are trying to fix, before fixing it.
  5. Make sure the code and commit follow the style guides.
  6. (Optional) Add type specifications and run Dialyzer where it makes sense.

Styleguides

Commit Messages

Commit messages should be limited to 50 characters without a period on the subject line and be written in imperative mood.

Longer explanations should be in the body, two lines below the message, wrapped at 72 characters.

See How to Write a Git Commit Message.

Code

  • Lines should be no longer than 80 characters. This is isn‘t some arbitrary length based on nostalgia, it’s just a choice of fitting limit if you want to have several files open at once next to each other on a modern wide screen monitor.
  • Functions should be exported one by one in their own export statement. This is so that one export can easily be rearranged or removed without messing with commas and Erlang attributes.

If you are unsure, try to find some similar code already in the repository and mimic that. Otherwise just submit the pull request to get some stylistic feedback if necessary.