Though Catalog Service is developed and maintained by Texas A&M University Libraries, we welcome community contributions. Involvement in Catalog Service can take many forms.
Deploying Catalog Service and trying it out at your own institution is itself a way of contributing to the development process. For more information on deployment strategies please see the Deployment Guide.
Once you are using Catalog Service the creation of new issues through GitHub is a major method of contribution towards Catalog Service development. Issues can be motivated by the discovery of a bug in the software, or by the desire to see either new features added or see changes to existing features.
There are two primary types of issues:
- Bug Report
- Feature Request
A Bug Report involves a problem with the existing software or a Feature is not working as designed or expected.
A Feature involves new functionality or behavior.
Community code and documentation contributions are welcome and should take the form of a GitHub Pull Request (PR). Each PR will need to be reviewed by a Catalog Service developer. A review will result in the PR being accepted and merged, a descriptive request for changes, or the PR being closed along with a detailed explanation.
It is our intention to maintain labeling on issues that are deemed to be low difficulty in order to provide a good point of entry for those looking to begin contributing code or documentation.
A PR description should include a list of the specific issues resolved, the predicted semantic versioning impact of the changes, and a description which characterizes the nature of the changes made. When creating a PR, an issue template is automatically provided to simplify this process.
For more information about semantic versioning please see Semantic Versioning Website. In general keep in mind:
- A Major Change is a breaking change that is not backwards compatible.
- A Minor Change is a non-breaking change that is backwards compatible to the last Major Change.
- A Patch is a trivial change or bug fix that should not impact compatibility.
We look forward to seeing your contributions. If you have any additional questions please contact the Catalog Service developers at [email protected].