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CONTRIBUTING.md

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CONTRIBUTING

Whilst inuitcss gratefully welcomes contributions from the open-source community, there are a number of requirements and principles that need adhering to before code is eligible for inclusion in the project.

Simplicity is paramount.

inuitcss is written in Sass, which provides us with a lot of incredibly powerful features. However, we do not want inuitcss to become a platform for Sass’ capabilities—all code that comes into inuitcss should be as simple and CSS-like as possible.

Adding this complexity is against a number of inuitcss’ core principles of team-based workflows, long-running and larger projects, and its flexibility.

  • It obscures functionality. This can make things harder to decipher, understand, and debug.
  • It adds points-of-failure. More moving parts means more things to go wrong. Always err on the side of simplicity.
  • It requires an advanced level of understanding. On large(r) projects, the variance in skill-level can differ greatly. From designers, to front-end developers, to software engineers, everyone will need to author some CSS at some point—make this learning curve as shallow as possible.
  • It creates a barrier to entry. inuitcss is working very hard to become a widely useful framework: it is taking active steps to become less opinionated and more flexible so that it can be implemented by a more varied user base—adding advanced Sass features will close this openness back up.
  • It adds unnecessary complexity. Working on large(r) projects commands a greater cognitive overhead as it is; adding more complexity is the exact wrong direction to go.

Kinds of code we do not want:

  • Hundred-line mixins designed to avoid a couple of lines of repetition: the overhead of typing a few more lines is much less than creating, documenting, learning, and maintaining complex Sass functionality.
  • Mixins which generate entire blocks of CSS: creating ‘black boxes’ in code often leads to obscurity, lack of understanding, lack of confidence, and lack of trust in a codebase. Everything should be as transparent and CSS-like as possible.

Sass provides us with a lot of fantastic features, but the introduction of complex, obscure, or monolithic code should always be avoided where possible.

If you are in doubt, please open an issue to discuss a feature/addition before submitting a pull request. This way we can assess code’s suitability and its likelihood of inclusion before your go to the effort of writing anything.

Git(Hub) Workflow

If you would like to submit a pull request, please follow the below Git process/workflow. It helps to give us a better paper-trail, and allows us to follow work through the issue/pull request process.

  1. Create a new issue for the proposed addition/change/fix. This allows us to discuss the suitability of the proposal before you begin work.
  2. Create a new branch entitled tkt-<issue-number>. Look at the URL of your new issue; take its number (e.g. 99) and create a branch called tkt-0099 (with leading zeroes). Do all of your work in this branch.
  3. Ensure that all unit tests are passing, and tests are added or updated appropriately for any new functions and parameterised mixins. See below
  4. Start all commit messages with [refs #<issue-number>]. If you’re working on issue 99, all of your commits should begin with [refs #0099]. This allows us to link every commit back to both an issue and a branch.
  5. Delineate your changes in CHANGELOG.md. Under “[Unreleased]”, make an entry in the the appropriate section, i.e. “Breaking changes”, “Fixes”, “New features” or “Minor changes”.
  6. Open a pull request into develop. Our main branch is develop, and this is where we want new work to be merged into. master is a release branch only.

Example: f000350. Here I can see that the ‘Implement proposed flag object fix’ commit happened against issue 76, and took place in a branch named tkt-0076. This means that I can find any discussions around this piece of work, and I know in which branch I should commit any further, related work.

The one downside to this workflow is that branches no longer have descriptive names, so running $ git branch might leave you looking at something like this:

develop
master
tkt-0014
tkt-0021
tkt-0058
tkt-0080
tkt-0083
tkt-0089

Use ghi to get detailed information about a particular branch and its related issue, e.g.:

$ ghi 14

Unit Tests

To run the unit tests, ensure you have previously run npm install. Then you will be able to run npm test.

We use the awesome oddbird/true package to write the tests.

You can find the documentation over on their homepage.