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Contributing to Opencast

This is a short outline of what to pay attention to when contributing to Opencast. If you are interested in a long document defining rules and recommendations as well as a detailed explanation of Opencast's branching model, take a look at the development process documentation. But this guide should suffice for most contributions.

Accepting Criteria for Patches in Different Versions

Updates between minor versions should be as smooth as possible and should usually not need manual intervention. That is why patches may only be accepted into releases branches (r/?.x) if they meet the following criteria:

  • Patches must not modify existing database tables
  • Patches must not modify the indexes or otherwise cause re-indexing
  • Patches must not modify existing translation keys
  • Patches must work with the same configuration within a major version

Patches which do not meet these criteria should target the branch develop to become part of the next major version.

Tests

When building Opencast, a set of unit tests is automatically run on the code. Passing these tests is a hard requirement. These (and a few more) tests are also run automatically on our CI system. Again, all tests need to pass.

If the CI tests on your pull request fail and you are sure it is not caused by your patch, please complain. Errors happen and committers can easily trigger a new build. But your patch will not be merged without these tests passing.

Additionally, a reviewer will be assigned to your pull request to ensure that there are no further issues. Once everything is fine, the reviewer will merge the pull request. The assignment may take some time. This is normal, so do not be concerned.

Checklist

  • Closes an accompanying issue if one exists
  • Pull request has a proper title and description
  • Appropriate documentation is included
  • Code passes automatic tests
  • The pull request has a clean commit history
  • Commits have a proper commit message (title and body)

There may be additional, special requirements for certain changes (e.g. database changes require update scripts) but you should be mostly fine if you follow this checklist. If you hit a special case, the reviewer will point that out and maybe even help to fix that issue.