mapcomplete/CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing to MapComplete

Hi! Thanks for checking out how to contribute to MapComplete!

There are multiple ways to contribute:

• Translating MapComplete to your own language can be done on the Weblate website
• If you encounter a bug, the issue tracker is the place to be
• A good start to contribute is to create a single map layer showing features which interest you. Read more about making your own theme.
• If you want to improve a theme, create a new theme, spot a typo in the repo... the best way is to open a pull request.

People who stick around and contribute in a meaningful way, might be granted write access to the repository (except the branches master and develop). This is done on a purely subjective basis, e.g. after a few pull requests and if you are a member of the OSM community.

Rights of contributors

If you have write access to the repository, you can make a fork of an already existing branch and push this new branch to GitHub. This means that this branch will be automatically built and be deployed to https://pietervdvn.github.io/mc/<branchname>. You can see the deploy process on GitHub Actions. Don't worry about pushing too much. These deploys are free and totally automatic. They might fail if something is wrong, but this will hinder no one.

Additionaly, some other maintainer might step in and merge the latest develop with your branch, making later pull requests easier.

Don't worry about bugs

As a non-admin contributor, you can not make changes to the master nor to the develop branch. This is because, as soon as master is changed, this is built and deployed on mapcomplete.org, which a lot of people use. An error there will cause a lot of grieve.

A push on develop is automatically deployed to [pietervdvn.github.io/mc/develop] which is used by quite some contributors. However, people using this version should know that this is a testing ground for new features and might contain a bug every now and then.

In other words, to get your theme deployed on the main instances, you'll still have to create a pull request. The maintainers will then doublecheck and pull it in.

If you have a local repository

If you have made a fork earlier and have received contributor rights, you need to tell your local git repository that pushing to the main repository is possible.

To do this:

1. type git remote add upstream git@github.com:pietervdvn/MapComplete
2. Run git push upstream to push your latest changes to the main repo (and not your fork). Running git push will push to your fork.

Alternatively, if you don't have any unmerged changes, you can remove your local copy and clone pietervdvn/MapComplete again to start fresh.

What not to contribute

I'm currently not accepting files for integration with some text editor. There are hundreds of editors out there, if every single one of them needs a file in the repo, this ends up as a mess. Furthermore, MapComplete doesn't want to encourage or discourage some text editors. At last, these files are hard to maintain and are hard to detect if they have fallen out of use.