CONTRIBUTING

ABOUT THIS DOCUMENTATION FILE

This is file CONTRIBUTING.

CONTRIBUTING contains guidance on how to participate in the
development of the "eights" project, which is intended to automate the
construction of 2D axonometric drawings in first angle projection,
within the open-source computer-aided design package FreeCAD.

CONTRIBUTING was written by Dr. Daniel C. Hatton

Material up to and including release 0.2 copyright (C) 2017-2018
University of Plymouth Higher Education Corporation

Changes since release 0.2 copyright (C) 2020 Dr. Daniel C. Hatton

This program, including this documentation file, is free software: you
can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser
General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation:
version 3 of the License.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
Lesser General Public License, and the GNU General Public License
which it incorporates, for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public
License [in file LICENSE] along with this program.  If not, see
<https://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

Daniel Hatton thanks Dr. Justin E. Rigden, Specialist Intellectual
Property Advisor, for authorizing, on behalf of the University of
Plymouth Higher Education Corporation, the release of this program
under the licence terms stated above.

CONTACT

Daniel Hatton can be contacted on <dan.hatton@physics.org>

GUIDANCE ON PARTICIPATION

Collaborators in the development of the "eights" project are always
welcome.  I would expect that most common ways in which people will
wish to contribute are:

- reporting bugs;
- suggesting ways to fix the already-known bugs listed in file
  README.md; and
- suggesting improvements to the software.

However, I don't intend the above list to impose restrictions: I'm
also happy to entertain contributions that don't fit into any of the
above categories.

Whichever form your contribution takes, a good first port of call will
be the "issues" page at
<https://github.com/danielhatton/eights/issues>.  If your proposed
contribution is relevant to any of the issues already present there,
then you can open the page with the thread for that issue, and submit
a comment; otherwise, you can click the "new issue" button.  Either
way, you'll have the possibility of expressing what you propose in a
text post and/or attaching files (although in both cases, you'll need
to be signed in with a GitHub account).

If you can't make your contribution via the "issues" page (perhaps
because you really don't want to set up a GitHub account, or perhaps
because some kind of firewall is blocking your access to the rather
strange route that GitHub uses for the upload and download of file
attachments), then as an alternative, you can e-mail your contribution
to me, Dr. Daniel Hatton, at <dan.hatton@physics.org>.

As always with open-source projects, contributions are especially
valued if they come with a patch to the code, implementing the bug
fixes or improvements that they propose.  If you do submit a patch,
please:
- state clearly who owns the copyright in the patch you're submitting;
- if you personally don't own the copyright (for example if you
  operate under a contract of employment that assigns the copyright in
  any code you write to your employer), then provide a brief summary
  of the procedure by which the actual copyright-holder has authorized
  you to submit the patch;
- state the licence terms under which you are making the patch
  available (for reasons of ease of integration with FreeCAD, it would
  be particularly helpful for such contributions to be under the GNU
  Lesser General Public Licence: for the initial release of eights, I
  have used version 3 of the LGPL).

Finally: thank you in advance to all contributors.