Firstly, thank you for taking an interesting in contributing! Aristotle is an open-source project, and welcomes contributions in the form of feature code, bug reports and fixes, tests, feature suggestions and anything else which may help to make it better software.
It’s a good idea to discuss potential changes with one of the maintainers before starting work. Although efforts are made to document future development work using the issue tracker, it will not always be up-to-date, and the maintainers may have useful information to share on plans.
The worst-case scenario would be for a contributor to spend a large amount of time producing a PR, only for it to be rejected by the maintainers because it is not consistent with their plans. A quick conversation before starting work can save a lot of time.
If a response is not forthcoming in the Discord chatroom, contacting one of the project maintainers directly but publicly may help. Please do not contact the maintainers privately, as it misses a good opportunity to share knowledge with a wide audience. Jon Pretty can usually be contacted on X.
All development work—whether bugfixing or implementing new
features—should have a corresponding issue before work starts. If you
have commit rights to the propensive/aristotle repository, push to a branch named
after the issue number, prefixed with issue/, for example, issue/423.
Pull requests should try to follow the coding style of existing code in the repository. They are unlikely to be rejected on grounds of formatting, except in extreme cases. Aristotle does not use automatic code-formatting because it has proven to produce unreliable results (and furthermore, hand-formatting is not particularly laborious).
Unfortunately an official coding style guide does not yet exist.
Any code that is inconsistently formatted will be fixed before merging, without complaint.
Pull requests should have at least one review before being merged. When opening a PR, contributors are welcome to suggest a reviewer. Pull requests should be left in draft mode until they are believed to be ready for review.
For code contributions, we prefer pull requests with corresponding tests. But we should not let perfect be the enemy of the good. Changes which break existing tests, however, are likely to be rejected during review.
New issues are welcome, both as bug reports and feature suggestions. More detail is preferable, and the clearest and most detailed reports will most likely be addressed sooner, but a short report from a busy developer is still preferred over a bug we never hear about. We will ask for more detail in triage if it’s needed.
Contributors and other participants in online discussions are expected to be polite, on-topic and to nurture a pleasant development environment for all Aristotle’s users. Propensive OÜ reserves the right to censure and—in extreme cases—ban users whose behavior, in their opinion, is detrimental toward this goal. But individualism is valued, and nobody should feel constrained in how they express themselves.