First of all, thank you for your interest! I'm very keen to get more contributors onboard and am excited to help out in whichever ways I can. This is an early stage, developed-too-fast, library which could really benefit from more contributors.
Contributing can take place in many forms, including but not limited to:
Bug Reports and Feature Requests are easy and the project is happily accepting them now. Please fire away!
As for Pull Requests I am excited to take on new contributors who can help with the code. Please see the section below about getting started.
If you're using rusty-machine and run into what you believe to be a bug. Then please create an issue to let me know. Even if you're not confident this is a bug I'd prefer to hear about it!
In the issue please include a description of the bug, and the conditions needed to replicate it. Minimal conditions would be preferred but I understand this can often be a lot of work. If you can provide an example of the code producing the bug this would be really handy too!
I strongly encourage feature requests! I'd love to get feedback and learn what the community wants to see next from this project. I have my own goals and planned features which can be seen in the Development document. Even if a feature is listed here please feel free to request it regardless - it may affect the order in which I implement things.
To request a feature please open an issue with a description of the feature requested. If you can include some technical details and requirements this would be a big help.
This section will cover the process for making code contributions to rusty-machine. Please feel free to make suggestions on how to improve this process (an issue on the repository will be fine).
We currently use a fork and pull request model to allow contributions to rusty-machine.
Please take a look through the code and API documentation
to identify the areas you'd like to help out with. Take a look through the current issues and see if there's anything you'd like to tackle.
Simple issues will (should) be tagged with the label easy.
If you decide you want to tackle an issue please comment on that issue stating that you would like to work on it. This will help us keep track of who is working on what.
So by now you should have the project forked and are ready to start working on the code. There are no hard conventions in place at the moment but please follow these general guidelines:
- Add comments to all private functions detailing what they do.
- Small pull requests are preferred! If the required change is large consider breaking it up or seek guidance on how best to proceed.
- Add new tests for any new functionality you add. This means examples within the documentation, unit tests and when relevant within the tests directory.
- There is (currently) no strict format for commit messages. But please be descriptive about the functionality you have added.
Once the issue has been resolved please create the PR from your fork into the master branch.
In the comments please reference the issue that the PR addresses, something like: "This resolves #XXX".
Other contributors will then review and give feedback. Once accepted the PR will be merged.
Even now the project is fairly large and a bit overwhelming to join. I'm happy to help people onboard and will do my best to make the process smooth.
For now I have no special measures in place to assist with this. Due to this I'm happy for potential contributors to create new issues detailing their interests and we can open a conversation about how you can help out. Additionally please feel free to comment on existing tickets detailing your interest and ask any questions you need to about how to proceed.
There are now some examples in the repository!
The examples are designed to illustrate how you can use rusty-machine and will work out-of-the-box. If these are unclear then please feel free to open up an issue (it will hopefully motivate improvements!).
Otherwise I'd encourage you to write your own small projects to test out the algorithms. There are some great datasets here from UCI. I've done some testing with the Wisconsin breast cancer data. Please provide feedback based on your experience!