Contributing

Contributions are welcome, and are greatly appreciated! Every little bit helps, and credit will be given. Join our Facebook group if you have any questions about how to get started contributing.

Bug reports

Please report bugs by opening a new issue in our GitHub repository. It is most helpful if you can include:

  • How Tabbycat was installed (on Heroku, locally on OS X, etc.)
  • Any details about your tournament and setup that might be helpful in troubleshooting
  • Detailed steps for how to reproduce the bug

Getting started

Important

We are using the git-flow workflow, so please submit any pull requests against the develop branch (and not master).

  • Generally we prefer that features and bug fixes are submitted as pull requests on their own branch (as described in the git-flow process)
  • We use Django’s testing tools — it would be great if new features came with unit tests
  • TODO: more detail on tests and pull request checklist/guidelines

Style guide

We use flake8 to check for a non-strict series of style rules. Warnings will trigger a Travis CI build to fail. The entire codebase can be checked by using:

$ flake8 .

While in the base directory

Semantic versioning convention

We follow Semantic Versioning. That said, since this is end-user software, there aren’t any downstream dependencies so the concept of a “public API” isn’t quite as obvious for Tabbycat as it is for projects more reliant on semantic versioning to manage dependencies. In complying with Semantic Versioning, we consider the following to be our “public API”, along with the following criteria for backwards incompatibility:

  • Database schema
    • if it cannot be migrated forwards or backwards using the standard migration function without user-input defaults
    • if migration forwards would entail losing data or require reformatting data
  • Management commands
    • if a command that used to work no longer works
  • GUI
    • if there is a major change to the workflow of any user
  • Tournament data importer, including tournament configuration
    • if files that used to work would no longer work.
    • however, with tournament configuration, Tabbycat could in most cases detect deprecated settings and interpret them in any new framework with a warning message.

Starting from version 0.7.0, we use code names for versions, being breeds of cats in alphabetical order.

Documentation

Documentation is created using Sphinx and hosted at Read The Docs. Pushes to develop will update the latest documentation set, while pushes to master will update the stable documentation set.

To preview the documentation locally, install the docs-specific requirements (from the base folder):

$ pip install -r 'docs/requirements.txt'

Then start the server:

$ sphinx-autobuild docs docs/_build/html --port 7999

You should then be able to preview the docs at 127.0.0.1:7999 <http://127.0.0.1:7999>