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Contributing

Preliminaries​

Bug fixes are highly encouraged!

For feature extensions to existing modules, it is generally recommended to start a discussion before you open a PR.

If you have a new module that you think could fit into this repository, please start by opening a GitHub issue to start a discussion, or reach out in the OpenJS slack. Note that for a new module you will also be asked to asses what level of maintenance you will be able to provide over the longer term.

Setup​

The deck.gl-community GitHub repository is similar to the deck.gl repository, which means that most of the deck.gl contribution instructions also apply to this repository

One of the biggest hurdles is often to make sure that you are using compatible versions of node and yarn. deck.gl-community uses volta to manage this. Simply install volta and the right versions of node and yarn will automatically be downloaded and used when you run any scripts in the deck.gl-community repository, without affecting the global versions of these tools on your machine.

If you for some reason do now want to install volta, and prefer to manually install node and yarn, you can find the correct yarn and node versions listed in the "volta": {...} section in the root package.json.

Branches​

Most work is done on the master branch, so PRs are expected to be branches off master.

Review​

Open Visualization team members will make efforts to review your PRs. As always, clean and focused PRs that do one thing only will be approved and landed faster. Instead of including an unrelated one line fix, consider making a second small PR.

Landing PRs​

Once comments are addressed and the CI tests on GitHub run clean, your PR will be landed by an Open Visualization team member.

Closing PRs​

PRs that do not receive updates to comments for one or two days will be closed, for "repository hygiene" reasons.

If this happens to you and you are coming back to address the PR, just reopen it once you have pushed your changed.

Fixing CI issues​

Unfortunately, many good PRs are closed. By far the most common reason is that the authors can't be bothered to make CI run clean.

Note that CI can usually be fixed in 1-2 minutes as follows:

  • yarn lint fix - will run prettier and eslint --fix and fixes 95% of failed CI checks.
  • yarn - also make sure you run yarn to update yarn.lock after making changes depdencies in any package.json files. For security reasons, GitHub CI will reject your PR if your yarn.lock file is out of date with your package.json files.

After running these commands just commit and push your PR again and it will likely run green.

Remark: When you run the above commands, make sure you are using the right versions of yarn and node. See the instructions for using volta in the setup section above. If you e.g. use an older version of yarn, your lock files etc will not match what CI expect.

Publishing new versions​

Open Visualization team members will make efforts to publish new versions once your PRs land. A good cadence is a weekly patch with any accumulated fixes.

Official contributors​

If you regularly contribute to one of the modules, you may be granted write access to the deck.gl-community GitHub repository allowing you e.g. sto push branches directly instead of working via a GitHub fork.

This is decided by the Open Visualization Technical Steering committee and is based on trust, merit and scope of contributions.