libreoffice-online/README.CONTRIBUTING.md
Miklos Vajna 91f26ff453 Contriburing instructions: add a section on commit messages
It happens in many cases that it's not clear what are the steps to
reproduce the problem to be fixed, let's have some explicit instructions
on how to document these + the reasons for having these rules.

Signed-off-by: Miklos Vajna <vmiklos@collabora.com>
Change-Id: I725f78dabd388fa85db0286e354527fd96e6d6be
2023-09-12 08:45:14 +02:00

66 lines
2.9 KiB
Markdown

## Online Contributor Representation & Certificate of Origin v1.0
By making a contribution to this project, I certify that:
(a) The contribution was created in whole or in part by me and I
have the right to submit it under the appropriate
version of the Mozilla Public License v2, or (for artwork)
the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license; or
(b) The contribution is based upon previous work that, to the best of
my knowledge, is covered under an appropriate open source license
and I have the right under that license to submit that work with
modifications, whether created in whole or in part by me, under
the aforementioned licenes, in the appropriate version; or
(c) The contribution was provided directly to me by some other person
who certified (a) or (b) and I have not modified it.
(d) I understand and agree that this project and the contribution are
public and that a record of the contribution (including all
metadata and personal information I submit with it, including my
sign-off) is maintained indefinitely and may be redistributed
consistent with this project or the open source license(s)
involved.
(e) I am granting this work to this project under the terms of both
the Mozilla Public License v2 and the GNU Lesser General Public
License version 3 as published by the Free Software Foundation:
When submitting a patch, to make this certification add a line that
states:
Signed-off-by: Random J Developer <random@developer.example.org>
using your real name and the email address (sorry, no pseudonyms
or anonymous contributions.)
## Other information to put into your commit message
When reviewing a patch, we look for the following information in the commit message:
- Title: a single line, short and to the point summary of what the patch does.
- The reason is to be able to do `git log --pretty=oneline` and have a usable result.
- Intro: observation of the current state
- Rationale: the problem to be solved is obvious to you, but not to the reviewer. It's good to
have a list of steps to reproduce the problem.
- Problem description: pros and cons of the current state
- Rationale: when some feature doesn't work the way expected, frequently there is some other
use-case that motivated the current behavior. It's easier to not break the old use-case with
your change if you're aware of the old use-case.
- If there was an old use-case and you found it by research, please document it, so the person
reading the commit message finds it easily.
- Solution: give orders to the codebase
- A short description of how you introduce new behavior while not breaking old behavior is useful,
because it may not be too obvious just by looking at what you changed.
An alternative is to have much of this information in a (public) issue, refer to that issue and have
a short commit message. That works better e.g. when using images to demonstrate the problem.