We want to make it as easy as possible for people to modify and contribute to PerfMonitor.
This is, really, a community project and community is important. Write to the mailing list, ask and answer questions, and generally being involved in growing the project is, perhaps, the most important contribution.
Opening an issue on the issue tracker is the most helpful thing. However, some notes:
- Check the issue tracker and mailing list to see if it's already a bug.
- Include as many details in your bug as possible. Finding your log file (often in /tmp, but can be controlled with command line flags) can be a great help.
- Often a bug comes with unexpected behavior from the simulation configuration. Please include the configuration and how you found the bug.
First things first:
Sign the Stillwater Contributor License Agreement (you can sign online at the bottom of that page).
You must sign this form, otherwise we cannot merge in your changes.
Always mention in the pull request that you've signed it, even if you signed it for a previous pull request (you only need to sign the CLA once).
If you're contributing on behalf of your company, please email the mailing list and look into signing Stillwater's Corporate Contributor License Agreement.
Documentation is always important. Fully worked out and tutorialized examples are maybe even more important as it introduces new users and coders to the basic thought process behind the software and its use. If you want to make a passage clearer, expand on the implications, write about schema and best practices, these are just as helpful as code.
Just running PerfMonitor and coming up with benchmarks and performance numbers in docs and on the mailing list is also helpful.
Check out TODO.md for random thoughts that authors have contributed. Usually if it's agreed that it's a good idea in the mailing list, in chat or elsewhere, a pull request to add to TODO.md is perfectly fine.
If you want to start simple, find a place to improve test coverage. The coverage metrics are part of "make test" and anything that improves testing is good news.
If you're a designer, most of the work on PerfMonitor to date has been on the backend -- creating and improving the UI/UX is certainly helpful!
Please do, and send the pull request. It may or may not get in as-is, but it will certainly generate discussion to see a working version. Obviously, well-tested and documented code makes a stronger case.
It's a general philosophy that, if it's modular and doesn't break things, it's generally a good thing to have! The worst that will happen is it will go unused and possibly become deprecated, and ultimately removed by the maintainers. So if you have a pet project, make sure it's either something you'll maintain or has enough of a user base to stick around.