Third-party contributions are essential to grow and expand the functionality of HALE. We want to keep it as easy as possible to contribute changes that get your use cases working. There are a few guidelines that we need contributors to follow so that we can have a chance of keeping on top of things.
- Make sure you have a GitHub account
- Fork and clone the repository on GitHub
- Set up your local development environment
- Create a feature branch from where you want to base your work.
- This is usually the master branch.
- To quickly create a topic branch based on master;
git checkout -b feature/my_contribution master
. Please avoid working directly on the master branch.
- Make commits of logical units.
- Make sure you use meaningful and properly formatted commit messages.
- Make sure you have added the necessary tests for your changes.
- Run all the tests to assure nothing else was accidentally broken.
All HALE projects use the same set of project preferences in Eclipse. These preferences include settings for compiler warnings and code formatting. Code formatting is applied automatically each time a file is saved in Eclipse.
We use a Groovy script apply-preferences.groovy
to set the preferences for new projects or update the preferences of existing projects.
When creating a new project in the default HALE plugin folders, run the script to set the project preferences.
Projects in the default HALE plugin folders (common
, ui
, util
, etc.) have a common prefix that should also be used for new projects.
The name of a project/bundle must conform to a package name, which is the root package of the bundle. There may be no two projects that have classes in the same package (with OSGi bundle fragments being the only exception).
Tests are implemented using JUnit. Tests for classes in a bundle are not added to the bundle itself, but to a separate bundle or fragment that adds the suffix .test
to the name of the original bundle.
Names of test classes by convention end with Test
, or with IT
if they are integration tests.
Test bundles/fragments need to be added to the Tests.product
. Make sure the product validates.
To run all tests the simplest way is to run the Tests product from within Eclipse. To run single test classes or methods, you can right click them in Eclipse and select Run As → JUnit Plug-in Test.
- Sign the Contributor License Agreement.
- Push your changes to a feature branch in your fork of the repository.
- Submit a pull request to the repository in the halestudio organization.
- The core team looks at Pull Requests on a regular basis and provides feedback.
- If your pull request passes code reviews and automated tests it will eventually get merged.
- Setting up your development environment
- Extend the HALE target platform (or how to add third party dependencies)
- Contributor License Agreement
- General GitHub documentation
- GitHub pull request documentation