Add a core/CONTRIBUTING.txt to conform to Github recommendations

Created on 14 June 2017, over 7 years ago
Updated 10 August 2024, about 2 months ago

Problem/Motivation

Github recently added new community tools which lints projects for their own open-source community recommendations, one of which is that "a CONTRIBUTING file tells your audience how to participate in your project.".

Proposed resolution

Add a core/CONTRIBUTING.txt to Drupal's repository, with the contents of Drupal's Ways to get involved documentation .

I suggest putting it in whichever folder holds MAINTAINERS.txt (i.e.: another piece of documentation you'd probably want to read if you wanted to interact with the Drupal community). In Drupal 8, MAINTAINERS.txt is in the core sub-directory; in Drupal 7 MAINTAINERS.txt is in the root folder.

I suggest we make it a .txt (as opposed to a markdown document / .md) to be consistent with other documentation in that directory.

I suggest we use the text from https://www.drupal.org/contribute because:

  1. that's a pretty comprehensive jumping-off point regardless of the reader's specialty (i.e.: it's for more than just developers),
  2. the text on that page doesn't change as often as the pages it links to (i.e.: less work to keep the file in-sync with the page on d.o), and,
  3. we have a lot of documentation on contributing, arguably more than we can reasonably expect someone to read in a single file.

Remaining tasks

  1. Review and feedback
  2. RTBC and feedback
  3. Commit
  4. Discuss how to backport to 7.x

User interface changes

None.

API changes

None.

Data model changes

None.

Feature request
Status

Postponed: needs info

Version

10.1

Component
Documentation 

Last updated about 3 hours ago

No maintainer
Created by

🇨🇦Canada mparker17 UTC-4

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Comments & Activities

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  • 🇺🇸United States smustgrave

    Brought this up on the #needs-review-queue-initiative with @quietone

    Needs an IS update and a patch that reflects #23, #25. We need to decide where the page would be in the handbook, too

  • Status changed to Postponed: needs info about 2 months ago
  • 🇳🇿New Zealand quietone

    Is there still interest in doing this?

    This is better suited to the documentation project now, since this better suited to the Drupal Wiki, See #23 and #25. Removing 'needs product manager review' tag for the same reason.

  • 🇺🇸United States drumm NY, US

    GitLab does have special handling of a CONTRIBUTING.md file in the root of a project’s repository. So it is worth adding one, although it might be a brief pointer to documentation on Drupal.org, so there is less that might get outdated.

  • 🇮🇹Italy apaderno Brescia, 🇮🇹

    Isn't this issue for a file that should be added to the Drupal core repository?
    The repository of this project is eventually used for pages on api.drupal.org, but only for Drupal 7 or previous Drupal core releases. In fact, the 8.x-1.x branch is empty.

  • 🇨🇦Canada mparker17 UTC-4

    For what it's worth, I filed this ticket in 2017 because I noticed that there was (and still is) a public mirror of Drupal core on Github, and I was excited about removing barriers for people who found it and felt interested in contributing.

    (I think at the time Github was also starting to push what they felt were ways to set up projects for healthy contributions)

    I believe I made the original patch by copying (and lightly-editing) some of what was on the Ways to Contribute page at the time, because I had a weak preference for reducing the number of "clicks" that a user has to do to get the information they want - but I realize for an ecosystem as complex as Drupal, there is only so much you can do.

    I still have a weak preference for reducing the number of clicks (not everyone has a fast, reliable, always-on Internet connection, even in 2024!) but I would be fine with adding a link to the documentation if that's what people can agree upon - to some extent anything is better than nothing.

    However, if we wanted to simply close this issue as "Won't fix" - i.e.: because there are already documentation links in the README and GitHub Mirror repo description - I'm fine with that too.

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