CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing

Contributions to MOPSA are welcome.

This document describes the technical aspects of how to contribute: the branching model of MOPSA and how contributions are merged into the code base. It also describes the legal aspects (licensing).

License

Unless explicitly specified, the components of the MOPSA software are distributed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. See the accompanying LICENSE file, or http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

The documentation and example files of the MOPSA software are distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. See https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/.

In any contribution, the license notice at the head of each file must remain intact, and new files should include the license notice. Please keep the AUTHORS file up to date and in alphabetical order. For each contributor include all the affiliations from the times of contribution and an up-to-date email contact.

Main Branch

The repository of MOPSA has a stable branch, main, containing the latest public release of MOPSA.

External Contributions

To contribute to MOPSA, it is advised to fork https://gitlab.com/mopsa/mopsa-analyzer in a separate repository and work on a separate branch <project>/main.

To remain synchronized with the upstream MOPSA repository, add a new remote to your local repository:

$ git remote add upstream git@gitlab.com:mopsa/mopsa-analyzer.git

The branch main should be read-only, fetched regularly from upstream and merged into local project branches:

$ git checkout main
$ git pull upstream main
$ git checkout my-project/main
$ git merge main

To integrate your contributions into the upstream project branch <project>/main, create a merge request using GitLab web interface and select mopsa/mopsa-analyzer/<project>/main as the target branch.

Feature Branches

Daily work is generally done in feature branches. For internal contributions, features will likely be merged into main and are named feature/<category>/<feature name>. For example:

$ git checkout main
$ git checkout -b feature/c/handle-union-assignment

After committing code and testing it, create a merge request to add the feature. Alternatively, the feature can be merged directly into main:

$ git checkout main
$ git pull origin main
$ git merge --no-ff feature/c/handle-union-assignment
$ git push origin main
$ git branch -d feature/c/handle-union-assignment
$ git push origin :feature/c/handle-union-assignment

Sometimes, one would like to clean the commit history of feature branch before merging into main. This can be done using git rebase -i before checking out main and merging into it.

Remain Synchronized

When features are merged into main, all existing branches should pull these changes to remain up to date:

$ git checkout main
$ git pull origin main
$ git checkout my-project/main
$ git merge main
$ git checkout feature/my-feature
$ git merge main

For external contributions, replace origin with upstream.