These guidelines instruct how to submit issues and contribute code to the JavaFXLibrary.
Bugs and enhancements are tracked in the issue tracker. If you are unsure if something is a bug or is a feature worth implementing, you can first ask on on Slack #JavaFXLibrary channel. These and other similar forums, not the issue tracker, are also places where to ask general questions.
Before submitting a new issue, it is always a good idea to check is the same bug or enhancement already reported. If it is, please add your comments to the existing issue instead of creating a new one.
On GitHub pull requests are the main mechanism to contribute code. They are easy to use both for the contributor and for person accepting the contribution, and with more complex contributions it is easy also for others to join the discussion. Preconditions for creating a pull requests are having a GitHub account, installing Git and forking the JavaFXLibrary project.
GitHub has good articles explaining how to set up Git, fork a repository and use pull requests and we do not go through them in more detail. We do, however, recommend to create dedicated branches for pull requests instead of creating them based on the master branch. This is especially important if you plan to work on multiple pull requests at the same time.
When submitting a pull request with a new feature or a fix, you should always include tests for your changes. These tests prove that your changes work, help prevent bugs in the future, and help document what your changes do. Depending an the change, you may need acceptance tests, unit tests or both.
Make sure to run all of the tests before submitting a pull request to be sure that your changes do not break anything.
Once you have code, documentation and tests ready, it is time to finalize the pull request.
If you have done any non-trivial change and would like to be credited, add yourself to AUTHORS.txt file.
Conflicts can occur if there are new changes to the master that touch the same code as your changes. In that case you should sync your fork and resolve conflicts to allow for an easy merge.
If the pull request contains multiple commits, it is recommended that you squash them into a single commit before the pull request is merged. See Squashing Github pull requests into a single commit article for more details about why and how.
Squashing is especially important if the pull request contains lots of temporary commits and changes that have been later reverted or redone. Squashing is not needed if the commit history is clean and individual commits are meaningful alone.