chinwag-android/CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing

Getting Started

1. Fork the repository on the GitHub page by clicking the Fork button. This makes a fork of the project under your GitHub account.
2. Clone your fork to your machine. git clone https://github.com/<Your_Username>/Tusky
3. Create a new branch named after your change. git checkout -b your-change-name (checkout switches to a branch, -b specifies that the branch is a new one)

Making Changes

Text

All English text that will be visible to users should be put in app/src/main/res/values/strings.xml. Any text that is missing in a translation will fall back to the version in this file. Be aware that anything added to this file will need to be translated, so be very concise with wording and try to add as few things as possible. Look for existing strings to use first. If there is untranslatable text that you don't want to keep as a string constant in a Java class, you can use the string resource file app/src/main/res/values/donottranslate.xml.

Translation

Each translation has a single file that contains all of the text. A given locale's file can be found at app/src/main/res/values-<language code>[_<country code>]/strings.xml. So, it could be values-en_US or values-es_ES, for example. Specifically, they're the two-letter ISO 639-1 language code and the optional ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code, which is used for a dialect of that particular country.

If you're starting a translation that doesn't already exist, you can just copy the English strings.xml to a new values directory and replace the English text inside each of the <string> </string> pairs.

Strings follow XML rules, which means that apostrophes and quotation marks have to be "escaped" with a backslash like: shouldn\'t and \"formidable\". Also, formatting is ignored when shown in the application, so things like new lines have to be explicitly expressed with codes like \n for a new line. See also: String Resources.

Please keep the organization and ordering of each of the strings the same as in the default strings.xml file. It just helps to keep so many translation files straight and up-to-date.

There are no icons or other resources needing localization, so it's just the text.

Kotlin

This project is in the process of migrating to Kotlin, we prefer new code to be written in Kotlin. We try to follow the Kotlin Style Guide and make use of the Kotlin Android Extensions.

Java

Existing code in Java should follow the Android Style Guide, which is what Android uses for their own source code. @Nullable and @NotNull annotations are really helpful for Kotlin interoperability.

Visuals

There are three themes in the app, so any visual changes should be checked with each of them to ensure they look appropriate no matter which theme is selected. Usually, you can use existing color attributes like ?attr/colorPrimary and ?attr/textColorSecondary. For icons and drawables, use a white drawable and tint it at runtime using ThemeUtils and specify an attribute that references different colours depending on the theme.

Saving

Any time you get a good chunk of work done it's good to make a commit. You can either uses Android Studio's built-in UI for doing this or running the commands:

git add .
git commit -m "Describe the changes in this commit here."

Submitting Your Changes

1. Make sure your branch is up-to-date with the master branch. Run:

git fetch
git rebase origin/master

It may refuse to start the rebase if there's changes that haven't been committed, so make sure you've added and committed everything. If there were changes on master to any of the parts of files you worked on, a conflict will arise when you rebase. Resolving a merge conflict is a good guide to help with this. After committing the resolution, you can run git rebase --continue to finish the rebase. If you want to cancel, like if you make some mistake in resolving the conflict, you can always do git rebase --abort.

2. Push your local branch to your fork on GitHub by running git push origin your-change-name.
3. Then, go to the original project page and make a pull request. Select your fork/branch and use master as the base branch.
4. Wait for feedback on your pull request and be ready to make some changes

If you have any questions, don't hesitate to open an issue or contact Tusky@mastodon.social. Please also ask before you start implementing a new big feature.