Writing a CONTRIBUTING.md

[jacobmealey]

I've been thinking about writing a contributing file for new contributors. As a newer contributor, there are a few things that I wish I would have known earlier. Some of them may seem trivial to experienced open-source developers but proved a bit tricky for me. It will also be beneficial to have a brief document for some of the internal toolings we use.

Below are some pre-PR tips I've picked up since starting to work on this project, if folks have other ideas it will be most beneficial.

• run make test, make checksrc, and make test-memory
• Add tests for new features
• Document new features in the help prompt and the man page

Also, I'm not sure if this should be added in the README or as a separate CONTRIBUTING.md, but it doesn't seem like many other curl projects have one so I'm not sure what should be done.

[dfandrich]

curl is just about the only repository under the curl project that gets contributions from the outside, and it has docs/CONTRIBUTE.md

[jacobmealey]

That makes sense, I was surprised not to see one in curl but I was only looking in the root of the repo I didn't think to check docs/ which now seems obvious to me.

[bagder]

I think it sounds like an excellent idea! Keeping these things in a separate file seems sensible to avoid the README from blowing up in size too much.

[jacobmealey]

Excellent, I will start writing one today and open a draft PR so folks can provide feedback. I will try to make sure it matches the tone/flow of the contributing file in curl.