CONTRIBUTING.md

Thanks for showing interest to contribute to TVQ 💖

When it comes to open-source, every contribution you make, makes the software better for everyone, and that is extensively valuable and warmly appreciated by the community. To express our gratitude for your contribution, we do our best to provide you with easy-to-follow steps to get started.

Repository Structure

This repository has three main branches:

• master; this is the branch where the source code resides.
• docs; this branch only contains the material used to generate the tvq website.
• gh-pages; this branch contains the static website generated from the material on the docs branch. The content of this branch is auto-generated once a commit is pushed to the docs branch.

Basics of git

If you are familiar with the basics of git you may skip this section; if you are not, this section provides you with few steps you may take to get started. You may also refer to this basic git commands for more details.

All the changes to the repository are made via pull requests (PR); you may take following steps to make a change and submit a PR.

1. Fork the repository by clicking on the Fork on the top-right corner on the repository's github page.

2. Open your favorite shell/terminal, cd to the path where you want to clone the TVQ code, and run:

   $ git clone https://github.com/<YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME>/tvq.git .

3. checkout the branch:

   3.a. if you want to contribute to the source code:

   $ git checkout master

   (master is the default branch, so it will checked-out by default after clone.)

   3.b. if you want to contribute to the documentation:

   $ git checkout docs

4. Make the change you want, and commit them. First you may run the following to make sure that the changes you made are "tracked":

   $ git status

   if this command outputs a message like the following, that means the changes you made are not tracked:

   On branch master
   Your branch is up to date with 'origin/master'.
    
   Untracked files:
     (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)
       I_am_not_tracked.txt
   
   nothing added to commit but untracked files present (use "git add" to track)

   Here the file I_am_not_tracked.txt is not tracked, and to track it, you may run the following:

   $ git add I_am_not_tracked.txt

   Then to commit the changes, you may run:

   $ git commit -m "A descriptive message for the changes you made."

5. The changes are now committed to git, but are stored on your machine only, to send them to Github, you may run the following:

   $ git push

6. Submit a pull request.

Getting Started

This repository contains multiple projects written in different programming languages (e.g., ASP.NET/C#, Python, and R), and each project executes a unique tasks. The components are:

• Collect information about the tools; implemented using different scripts each written a programming language that best matches the package management system.

  Getting started with the Crawlers

• Aggregate collected information and search for scholarly information, and perform preliminary statistical analysis; implemented in ASP.NET C# and is available as a webservice with API-based access.

  Getting started with the Webservice

• Statistical analysis and plotting; implemented via multiple python scripts.

  Getting started with the Statistical Analysis Scripts

License

By contributing your code to the TVQ GitHub repository, you agree to license your contribution under the MIT license.