Contributing¶

This extension is developed during the spare time of the author, so every contribution is welcome. Please take a look at the issue list on github for open issues. Maybe there is an item you can help with. For discussions there is a gitter room.

Developing¶

The IAR-vsc plugin is written in TypeScript. It’s not necessary to be an expert in this language to contribute (the author is also not an expert). Again, the gitter room is the place to be to ask questions and discuss things.

Before starting implementing things, please create first an issue or feature request on the github issue page. This way I have an overview what is going on and we can start a discussion when necessary.

Branches¶

There are two important branches when contributing:

master
dev

You should start from one of those two branches. The difference is that the master branch is more stable, but I also expect when receiving a pull request on the master branch that everything is done by the contributor. The following list of items is a start of requirements your pull request should satisfy:

Feature fully tested
Style is ok
Documentation is up-to-date (including this sphinx documentation)

If one of these items are not satisfied, then I will try to merge on the dev branch. If this is not possible, I will ask to either fix the pull request to meet the above items or rebase to the dev branch.

On the dev branch, I tolerate that some of the above items are missing. It is a dev branch, so it is still under development. However, this branch is less stable than the master branch. Not only the features on this branch, but also the history. It is possible that from time to time I will cleanup the history. I will try to keep this to a minimum, but keep in mind this could happen.

There is also a third branch, pluyckx. This is my personal dev branch. I advise to not contribute on this branch. The history will change a lot, and it will contain experiments. At home I am not really using IAR, so I have to test things at the office. This branch is used to share changes.

Testing¶

In order to make sure the plugin keeps working, there is some testing to be done. To be honest, there are not a lot of tests at the moment, but I would like to change that. So I advise to write tests. There are different frameworks which help to write tests. Currently two modules are added which will help with writing tests:

Mocha
Sinon (ts-sinon)

The first module helps writing test suites and the tests themselves. The second helps mocking functions and modules. When writing tests, please use those two modules. If you want to use different modules or add more modules to help with some tasks, please discuss this first with the author.

Documentation¶

The documentation is created using Sphynx and hosted on Read The Docs. When contributing, please update the documentation. Or at least give a good start so the author can finalize it. Update an already existing page, or start a new one if necessary.

License¶

All source files in this repository are released under the MPL 2.0 license. If you create new files, you have to add the license header to your source files. Probably you can just reuse a header from a file in the repository of the extension.