Contribution guidelines

Contributing in General

Our project welcomes external contributions. If you have an itch, please feel free to scratch it.

To contribute code or documentation, please submit a pull request.

A good way to familiarize yourself with the codebase and contribution process is to look for and tackle low-hanging fruit in the issue tracker. Before embarking on a more ambitious contribution, please quickly get in touch with us.

For general questions or support requests, please refer to the discussion section.

Note: We appreciate your effort, and want to avoid a situation where a contribution requires extensive rework (by you or by us), sits in backlog for a long time, or cannot be accepted at all!

Proposing new features

If you would like to implement a new feature, please raise an issue before sending a pull request so the feature can be discussed. This is to avoid you wasting your valuable time working on a feature that the project developers are not interested in accepting into the code base.

Fixing bugs

If you would like to fix a bug, please raise an issue before sending a pull request so it can be tracked.

Merge approval

A pull request can be reviewed by any committer, but only a maintainer of the respective repository can merge it to the main branch.

Quick execution

The governance team favours quick iterations and execution. Contributors and committers are encouraged to provide quick and effective feedback for finalizing the contributions.

Stale contributions will be flagged and eventually closed.

Legal

Each source file must include a license header for the MIT Software. Using the SPDX format is the simplest approach. e.g.

# Copyright © Docling a Series of LF Projects, LLC
# For web site terms of use, trademark policy and other project policies please see https://lfprojects.org.

We have tried to make it as easy as possible to make contributions. This applies to how we handle the legal aspects of contribution. We use the same approach - the Developer's Certificate of Origin 1.1 (DCO) - that the Linux® Kernel community uses to manage code contributions.

We simply ask that when submitting a patch for review, the developer must include a sign-off statement in the commit message.

Here is an example Signed-off-by line, which indicates that the submitter accepts the DCO:

Signed-off-by: John Doe <john.doe@example.com>

You can include this automatically when you commit a change to your local git repository using the following command:

git commit -s

Communication

Please feel free to connect with us using the discussion section of the main Docling repository.