conquest/CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing to CONQUEST

Thank you for your interest in contributing to the development of CONQUEST. The current roadmap can be seen on the Conquest GitHub issues page. The features and developments planned are organised through milestones. If you want to submit a new issue please use one of the templates, and provide as much information as possible, including input files needed to reproduce any unusual or incorrect behaviour. We would also be happy for you to fork the repository to fix a bug, and then submit a pull request.

Please note that, while we will endeavour to fix any bugs, and are happy to receive suggestions of new features, we are not able to guarantee any level of support.

Joining the development team

We welcome new developers. If you are interested in contributing a new feature, please suggest it via the issues page. If you are interested in contributing to an existing feature, please contact the development team.

We follow a git branching workflow (also described here, though we do not use the gitflow tool). You may find the figures in these references very helpful in understanding the overall workflow. The key idea is that all developments should be made on a branch created from the develop branch. The overall approach is this:

• We consider the GitHub repository to be the central repository (though as Git is distributed, there is no such thing as an actual central repository). We designate this repository as origin.
• The origin/master branch is the main branch which always represents a production-ready state.
• The origin/develop branch is where developments which have been delivered for the next release reside.
• Feature branches (named f-FeatureName) branch off develop and are used to develop new features or functionality for a future release (possibly unspecified). They may reside on a developer's local repository only in the early stages, but will need to be pushed for collaboration and discussion. They will merge into develop.
• Release branches (named release-Release) branch from develop and merge into both master and develop. Release branches allow new developments to proceed on develop while final changes and bug fixes are made to the release.
• Hotfix branches (named hotfix-Version) branch off master and merge into both master and develop. They are only used for urgent fixes to an existing release.