capistrano/CONTRIBUTING.md

CONTRIBUTING

The issue tracker is intended exclusively for things that are genuine bugs, or improvements to the code.

If you have a user support query, or you suspect that you might just be holding it wrong, drop us a line at the mailing list, StackOverflow or at CodersClan. The mailing list is moderated to cut down on spam, so please be patient, if you use StackOverflow, make sure to tag your post with "Capistrano". (Not forgetting any other tags which might relate, rvm, rbenv, Ubuntu, etc.)

If you have an urgent problem you can use CodersClan to solve your problem quickly. CodersClan has a community of Capistrano experts dedicated to solve code problems for bounties.

Wherever you post please be sure to include the version of Capistrano you are using, which versions of any plugins (capistrano-rvm, capistrano-bundler, etc.). Proper logs are vital, if you need to redact them, go ahead, but be careful not to remove anything important. Please take care to format logs and code correctly, ideally wrapped to a sane line length, and in a mono spaced font. This all helps us to gather a clear understanding of what is going wrong.

If you really think that you found a bug, or want to enquire about a feature, or send us a patch to add a feature, or fix a bug, please keep a few things in mind:

When Submitting An Issue:

If you think there's a bug, please make sure it's really a bug in Capistrano. As Capistrano sits on the (sometimes rough) edges between SSH, Git, the network, Ruby, RVM, rbenv, chruby, Bundler, your Linux distribution, countless shell configuration files on your end, and the server… there's a good chance the problem lies somewhere else.

Please make sure you have reviewed the FAQs at http://www.capistranorb.com/.

It's really important to include as much information as possible, versions of everything involved, anything weird you might be doing that might be having side effects, include as much as you can in a GitHub Gist and link that from the issue, with tools such as Gist, we can link to individual lines and help work out what is going wrong.

If you are an experienced Ruby programmer, take a few minutes to get our test suite running, and do what you can to get a test case written that fails, from there we can understand exactly what it takes to reproduce the issue (as it's documented with code)

When Requesting a Feature:

We can't make everyone happy all of the time, and we've been around the block well enough to know when something doesn't work well, or when your proposed fix might impact other things.

We prefer to start with "no", and help you find a better way to solve your problem, sometimes the solution is to build faster horses, sometimes the solution is to work around it in a neat way that you didn't know existed.

Please don't be offended if we say no, and don't be afraid to fight your corner, try and avoid being one of the poisonous people

Submitting A Pull Request:

Pull requests are awesome, and if they arrive with decent tests, and conform to the guidelines below, we'll merge them in as soon as possible, we'll let you know which release we're planning them for (we adhere to semver so please don't be upset if we plan your changes for a later release)

• The code is MIT licenced, your code will fall under the same license if we merge it.
• We can't merge it without a good commit message. If you do this right, Github will use the commit message as the body of your pull request, double win.
• If you are referencing an improvement to an existing issue (if we have not yet merged it )
• Add an entry to the CHANGELOG under the ### master section, but please don't mess with the version.
• If you add a new feature, please make sure to document it, open a corresponding pull request in the documentation and mention the code change pull request over there, and Github will link everything up. If it's a simple feature, or a new variable, or something changed, it may be appropriate simply to document it in the generated Capfile or deploy.rb, or in the README
• Take care to squash your commit into one single commit with a good message, it saves us a lot of work in maintaining the CHANGELOG if we can generate it from the commit messages between the release tags!
• Tests! It's tricky to test some parts of Capistrano, but do your best, it might just serve as a starting point for us to build a reliable test on top of, and help us understand where you are coming from.