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Please, before sending patches, read these brief comments. They are here to help the project have both its users happy using the program and the developers/maintainers feel good when trying to change code that other people contributed.

For the record, when this document mentions "I", it mostly means Rogério Brito's (@rbrito) is the one to blame.

Write good commit messages

When you write your pull request and your commit messages, please, be detailed, explaining why you are doing what you are doing. Don't be afraid of being too verbose here. Also, please follow the highly recommended guidelines on how to write good good commit messages.

When in doubt, follow the model of the Linux kernel commit logs. Their commit messages are some of the best that I have seen. Also, the ffmpeg has some good messages that I believe that should be followed. If you are in a hurry, read the section named "Contributing" from subsurface's README.

Test that your changes don't break existing functionality

Make sure that you have all dependencies installed, like via:

pip install -r requirements.txt
pip install -r requirements-dev.txt

Run the test suite with

py.test -v --cov edx_dl --cov-report html

If some test fails, please don't send your changes yet. Fix what broke before sending your pull request.

If you need to change the test suite, explain in the commit message why it needs to be changed (e.g., the page layout or the authentication methods from edX changed, or they implemented a new kind of course).

Check for potential bugs

Please, help keep the code tidy by checking for any potential bugs with the help of pep8, pyflakes, and pylint. If you know of any other good tools for analyzing the code, let me know about them!

If you happen to find any issue reported by these programs, I welcome you to fix them. Many of the issues are usually very easy to fix and they are a great way to start contributing to this (and other projects in general). Furthermore, we all benefit from a better code base.

Changes in the tools that we use

If you are proposing the use of a substitute of a tool that we already use, take a few paragraphs to tell us why we would like to change.

If we are not using something, it is most likely that one of the following options applies:

  1. I (@rbrito) may know even know that what you are proposing exists or have not yet "seen the light" as to why I should use it instead of using what I am currently using.
  2. Even if I know about the tool, I may not know how to use it, or how it would make me more productive. Educate me and we all will gain from a better project.