Contributing

Hey there!

I'm Hylke, the creator of this project. It's about time I wrote something up about how to contribute to SparkleShare, so here goes...

Contributions to SparkleShare are always welcome! I'm not a great coder. I like to design icons and interfaces, so there are always bugs or things that can be done better. Take a look at the list of open issues. Smaller issues or places where refactoring is needed are marked with FIXME or TODO in the source code. If you have a fix for SparkleShare, simply open a pull request against the master branch (keeping in mind the coding style) and if you think your change is significant enough to be copyrighted, feel free to add your name and email to the AUTHORS file. Releases are done at least once a month, so there won't be long waits for bug fixes.

SparkleShare tries to keep things simple and to stay out of people's way. Features are only added if they are essential and helpful to a majority of users. If you have a feature that you'd like to be added, please open an issue first, so there can be a discussion whether the feature is actually needed (or it may be it can be done in some other way); do not waste work on a feature that isn't actually desired. By limiting the amount of features, we can spend more time on making the core features solid in order to help people get things done.

Often requests come in to add preferences. I'm very pleased that we've been able to solve most problems reported and features requested without adding a "preference". Currently SparkleShare has only one preference: enabling/disabling notifications. Hopefully it will stay this way and we can withhold from adding a preference panel of some kind (but I can't rule it out). Figuring out how things can be done without burdening people with a preference is much more challenging and rewarding in my opinion. Free Software UI is a great article about this topic and I recommend reading it.

Looking forward to your contributions! :)

Hylke