First off, thanks for taking the time to contribute. We welcome all contributions, big or small, and aim to make contributing to PQAI as easy and transparent as possible.
Please note that this project and everyone participating in it is governed by our Code of Conduct. By participating, we expect you to uphold this code. Thank you :)
PQAI is an open-source library of modular components frequently required in research and development activities in the patent AI space. You can contribute to PQAI by highlighting and fixing breaks in existing functionality, suggesting and/or developing new components or enhancements to existing components.
Before filing a bug report, please check the issues list to see if it has already been reported. If a relevant issue has been reported, please provide any additional information on the same issue instead of creating a duplicate.
While reporting a bug, please try to include as many details as possible, such as the operating system under which you encountered the bug, your programming environment, how the bug might be reproduced, etc. If you know which part of the code might have cause it, do share it, otherwise, it's okay to omit this information.
You can suggest enhancements in two major ways: enhancements to existing components in terms of their functionalities and APIs, or new components to be included in PQAI.
While suggesting enhancements, it would be helpful if you can share thoughts some of the following questions:
(a) Is the enhancement under the scope of PQAI?
(b) Is it a general-purpose feature likely to be used widely or does it have a specific (rare) use case?
(c) Under what situations could the feature be helpful?
(d) Can any of the existing components be modified to provide the required functionality?
(e) Does the feature require solving a complex problem? If yes, are there any techniques you know which could go into devising a solution?
(f) Are you planning to work on (and contribute) this enhancement?
Before considering working on any enhancement or bug fixing, please create an issue for it if one is not already created.
Before submitting the pull request, please make sure that all tests are passing. Explicit mention of this in the pull request description is encouraged. If you feel that the changes or additions you have made are not covered by the existing tests, please add appropriate tests.
If the changes you have made change the API, please make sure you also update the API documentation. We request you to discuss with the maintainers before making changes in the API.
When submitting the pull request, please provide details of what change has been made and why you think the change is necessary.
If you want to report a security vulnerability in the code or in any of the dependencies, instead of creating an issue, please report it directly to one of the maintainers. The reason behind this is to avoid misuse of this information. We will prioritise fixing the issue and keep you posted on the progress over email.
While making changes to the code, please make sure that your code style matches that of the existing code. We aim to follow the PEP-8 coding style guidelines as much as possible.
When you submit any code or code changes, your submissions are understood to be under the same MIT License that covers the project. Feel free to contact the maintainers if that's a concern.
If you have any questions that this guide does not answer, please create an issue.