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CONTRIBUTING.md

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How to Contribute

At NS1, it makes us very happy to get pull requests, and we appreciate the time and effort it takes to put one together. Below are a few guidelines that can help get your pull request approved and merged quickly and easily.

It's important to note that the guidelines are recommendations, not requirements. You may submit a pull request that does not adhere to the guidelines, but ideation and development may take longer or be more involved.

  • Avoid getting nitpicked for basic formatting. Match the style of any given file as best you can - tabs or spaces as appropriate, curly bracket placement, indentation style, line length, etc. If there are any linters mentioned in docs or Makefile, please run them.

  • Avoid changes that have any possibility of breaking existing uses. Some of these codebases have many of users, doing creative things with them. Breaking changes can cause significant challenges for other users. It's important to note that some projects are dependencies of other projects, and changes may require cross-code base coordination. It can be challenging to identify if a small change will have large ramifications, so we mainly ask that you keep this in mind when writing or modifying code. Do your best to preserve interfaces, and understand that NS1 may need to reject pull requests if they would jeopardize platform stability or place an undue burden on other users.

  • If there are unit and/or integration tests, keeping the test suites passing is a must before we can merge. And nice tests around the changes will definitely help get a patch merged quickly.

  • Ensure that any documentation that is part of the project is updated as part of the pull request. This helps to expedite the merge process.

  • Be considerate when introducing new dependencies to a project. If a new dependency is necessary, try to choose a well-known project, and to pin the version as specifically as possible.

Opening an issue

Below are a few guidelines for opening an issue on one of NS1's open-source repositories. Adhering to these guidelines to the best of your ability will help ensure that requests are resolved quickly and efficiently.

  • Be specific about the problem. When describing your issue, it's helpful to include as many details as you can about the expected behavior versus what happened or is happening instead.
  • Be specific about your objective. Help us understand exactly what you are trying to accomplish so that our developers have a clear understanding about the particular problem you are trying to solve. In other words, help us avoid the "XY Problem".
  • Indicate which products, software versions, and programming languages you are using. In your request, indicate which NS1 product(s) you're using and, if relevant, which versions you are running. Also include any third-party software and versions that are relevant to the issue. If not obvious, include which programming language(s) you are using.
  • If possible, provide a reproducible example of the problem. This allows us to better examine the issue and test solutions.
  • If possible, include stack/error traces. Note: ensure there is no sensitive included in your stack/error traces.

Closing an issue

  • If an issue is closed by a commit, reference the relevant PR or commit when closing.
  • If an issue is closed by NS1 for any reason, you should expect us to include a reason for it.
  • If the fix does not work or is incomplete, you are welcome to re-open or recreate the issue. When doing so, it's important to be clear about why the previous fix was inadequate, to clarify the previous problem statement, and/or to modify the scope of the request. Please keep in mind that project status consideration or conflicting priorities may require us to close or defer work on the new or reopened issue. If that happens, feel free to reach out of support@ns1.com for more information.

Tags on issues

In some projects we (NS1) may apply basic tags on some issues, for organizational purposes. Note: we do not use tags to indicate timelines or priorities.

Here are definitions for the most common tags we use:

  • BUG - This tag confirms that the issue is a bug we intend to fix. The issue will remain open until it is resolved.
  • ENHANCEMENT - This tag indicates that we have categorized the issue as a feature request. Depending on priorities and timelines, we may close issues with this tag and track them in our internal backlog instead.