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Contributing

Contributing

We're a friendly bunch, and happy to chat. You can get in touch with the primary developers to talk about the project using Signal or Discourse. These are the main community discussion hubs around the dGC project.

How to contribute

  • Fork the repository to your own GitHub account.

  • Set up your development environment (ideally using our instructions here for maximum compatibility with our own development environments).

  • Ideally, you should discuss the proposed change with our team, because we can only accept pull requests with an accepted need for a new feature or fix.

  • We can discuss with you our recommendations for implementation of the new feature, for maximum potential 'mergeability' of your PR.

  • Once you are ready to show us your work, create a pull request on our repo, detailing what the change is and details about the fix or feature. PRs that affect the calculations or any other 'mission critical' part of the code will need suitable tests which we can run.

  • We will endeavour to review and merge in a reasonable time frame, but will usually not merge straight into master, rather we will merge into an upcoming release branch.

Coding style

We are not Python experts, but encourage use of Python best practices where possible. We are not going to get too pedantic over style though.

Some helpful sources of information on Python style are:

Intellectual Property (IP) of contributions

  • The copyright over the IP in this and other Growth Chart related repositories is owned by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, which releases it under an open source license. Consult the individual repository for specifics on which license we have used.

  • If you submit a contribution to the repository, we ask that you agree to transfer all IP rights of the contribution, both now and in the future, to the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, in perpetuity. This clause is purely to allow RCPCH to continue to exert an unchallenged copyright over the open source work. Clearly, asserting a copyright is crucial to open source work.

  • For larger contributions we may require a Contributor Covenant to support this agreement over transfer of title, however for small contributions, it is probably sufficient that you have read and understood this document, and that the act of submitting a PR is acceptance of these terms.

  • All contributors will, of course, proudly be acknowledged in the Acknowledgements section (if you make a PR, don't forget to add yourself there!).