# Introduction

First off, thank you for considering contributing to abqpy. It's people like you that make abqpy such a great tool.

Following these guidelines helps to communicate that you respect the time of the developers managing and developing this open source project. In return, they should reciprocate that respect in addressing your issue, assessing changes, and helping you finalize your pull requests.

Keep an open mind! Improving documentation, bug triaging, or writing tutorials are all examples of helpful contributions that mean less work for you.

abqpy is an open source project and we love to receive contributions from our community — you! There are many ways to contribute, from writing tutorials or blog posts, improving the documentation, submitting bug reports and feature requests or writing code which can be incorporated into abqpy itself.

Again, defining this up front means less work for you. If someone ignores your guide and submits something you don’t want, you can simply close it and point to your policy.

# Ground Rules

This includes not just how to communicate with others (being respectful, considerate, etc) but also technical responsibilities (importance of testing, project dependencies, etc). Mention and link to your code of conduct, if you have one.

- Ensure cross-platform compatibility for every change that's accepted. Windows, Mac, Debian & Ubuntu Linux.
- Create issues for any major changes and enhancements that you wish to make. Discuss things transparently and get community feedback.
- Don't add any classes to the codebase unless absolutely needed. Err on the side of using functions.
- Keep feature versions as small as possible, preferably one new feature per version.
- Be welcoming to newcomers and encourage diverse new contributors from all backgrounds. See the [Python Community Code of Conduct](https://www.python.org/psf/codeofconduct/).

# Your First Contribution

Unsure where to begin contributing to Atom? You can start by looking through these beginner and help-wanted issues:
Beginner issues - issues which should only require a few lines of code, and a test or two.
Help wanted issues - issues which should be a bit more involved than beginner issues.
Both issue lists are sorted by total number of comments. While not perfect, number of comments is a reasonable proxy for impact a given change will have.

Here are a couple of friendly tutorials you can include: http://makeapullrequest.com/ and http://www.firsttimersonly.com/

Working on your first Pull Request? You can learn how from this _free_ series, [How to Contribute to an Open Source Project on GitHub](https://egghead.io/series/how-to-contribute-to-an-open-source-project-on-github).

As a side note, it helps to use newcomer-friendly language throughout the rest of your document. Here are a couple of examples from [Active Admin](https://github.com/haiiliin/abqpy/blob/2025/CONTRIBUTING.md):

At this point, you're ready to make your changes! Feel free to ask for help; everyone is a beginner at first :smile_cat:

If a maintainer asks you to "rebase" your PR, they're saying that a lot of code has changed, and that you need to update your branch so it's easier to merge.

# Getting started

For something that is bigger than a one or two line fix:

1. Create your own fork of the code
2. Do the changes in your fork
3. If you like the change and think the project could use it:
   - Be sure you have followed the code style for the project.
   - Sign the Contributor License Agreement, CLA, with the jQuery Foundation.
   - Note the jQuery Foundation Code of Conduct.
   - Send a pull request indicating that you have a CLA on file.

Small contributions such as fixing spelling errors, where the content is small enough to not be considered intellectual property, can be submitted by a contributor as a patch, without a CLA.

As a rule of thumb, changes are obvious fixes if they do not introduce any new functionality or creative thinking. As long as the change does not affect functionality, some likely examples include the following:

- Spelling / grammar fixes
- Typo correction, white space and formatting changes
- Comment clean up
- Bug fixes that change default return values or error codes stored in constants
- Adding logging messages or debugging output
- Changes to ‘metadata’ files like Gemfile, .gitignore, build scripts, etc.
- Moving source files from one directory or package to another

# How to report a bug

When filing an issue, make sure to answer these five questions:

1. What version of abqpy are you using (abqpy version)?
2. What operating system and processor architecture are you using?
3. What did you do?
4. What did you expect to see?
5. What did you see instead?
   General questions should go to the golang-nuts mailing list instead of the issue tracker. The gophers there will answer or ask you to file an issue if you've tripped over a bug.

# How to suggest a feature or enhancement

If you find yourself wishing for a feature that doesn't exist in abqpy, you are probably not alone. There are bound to be others out there with similar needs. Many of the features that abqpy has today have been added because our users saw the need. Open an issue on our issues list on GitHub which describes the feature you would like to see, why you need it, and how it should work.
