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CONTRIBUTING.md

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Coding style

When writing code it is generally a good idea to try and match your formatting to that of any existing code in the same file, or to other similar files if you are writing new code. Consistency of layout is far more important that the layout itself as it makes reading code much easier.

One golden rule of formatting -- please don't use tabs in your code as they will cause the file to be formatted differently for different people depending on how they have their editor configured.

Testing

Having a good suite of tests is very important to the stability and maintainability of any code base. The tests in the Rails port code are by no means complete, but they are extensive, and must continue to be so with any new functionality which is written. Tests are also useful in giving others confidence in the code you've written, and can greatly speed up the process of merging in new code.

When hacking, you should:

  • Write new tests to cover the new functionality you've added.
  • Where appropriate, modify existing tests to reflect new or changed functionality.
  • Never comment out or remove a test just because it doesn't pass.

You can run the existing test suite with:

bundle exec rake test

You can generate test coverage stats with:

sudo gem install rcov
rcov -x gems test/*/*.rb

The tests are automatically run on commit with the results shown at http://cruise.openstreetmap.org/

Comments

Sometimes it's not apparent from the code itself what it does, or, more importantly, why it does that. Good comments help your fellow developers to read the code and satisfy themselves that it's doing the right thing.

When hacking, you should:

  • Comment your code - don't go overboard, but explain the bits which might be difficult to understand what the code does, why it does it and why it should be the way it is.
  • Check existing comments to ensure that they are not misleading.

Code Documentation

To generate the HTML documentation of the API/rails code, run the command

rake doc:app

Committing

When you submit patches, the project maintainer has to read them and understand them. This is difficult enough at the best of times, and misunderstanding patches can lead to them being more difficult to merge. To help with this, when submitting you should:

  • Split up large patches into smaller units of functionality.
  • Keep your commit messages relevant to the changes in each individual unit.

When writing commit messages please try and stick to the same style as other commits, namely:

  • A one line summary, starting with a capital and with no full stop.
  • A blank line.
  • Full description, as proper sentences with capitals and full stops.

For simple commits the one line summary is often enough and the body of the commit message can be left out.

Sending the patches

If you have forked on GitHub then the best way to submit your patches is to push your changes back to GitHub and then send a "pull request" on GitHub.

Otherwise you should either push your changes to a publicly visible git repository and send the details to the rails-dev list or generate patches with git format-patch and send them to the rails-dev list.