Hi everybody, We have recently got some offer to contribute to Github librairies either by adding more parts or helping with the validation process. There were some questions from a few people about how it all works, so this email is explaining it all.
First, let's explain how a simple user would be contributing to an existing library. It works by forking the chosen library repository, modifying it, and then opening a pull request. Then, the librarians will validate the changes and do the actual pull. The relevant documentation on github is here<https://help.github.com/articles/fork-a-repo>for how to fork and clone the fork. When the fork is cloned locally, it is time to make the changes. When KiCad is installed and the Github plugin is enabled, which is now by default when compiling, KiCad gets its footprints directly from there, but by adding the option "allow_pretty_writing_to_this_dir" to an entry in the fp-lib-table (the options dialog in the library management window can be used for that), files in the typed directory will prevail over the github one. Another option is to add a entry of type "Pretty" in the table. So when the changes are ready, they need to me committed and pushed to the fork. Finally, to initiate the pull request, it is clearly thoroughly explained here<https://help.github.com/articles/using-pull-requests#fork--pull>. One thing I want to mention is that it will be really helpful if the contributor writes his source for the footprint in the pull request message. For example, a link to a datasheet. Now, this means we need people who look over every pull request and validate the changes before pulling it in. Obviously, this is very time consuming, but it's needed if we want good quality libraries. Our team of librarians currently is quite small and it will need to expand if we want to be able to manage contributions, which will only go up in quantity once the github plugin is used more and more. So I hope this summarizes well the process of contributing to libraries. For the people who recently expressed interest to help and/or contribute on the developers mailing list, namely Jean-Paul Louis and Alejandro Méndez A, I was thinking you could start off small with a contribution in the form of a pull request, and then if all goes well we'll look into adding you to the librarians team. There are lots of things to do, some of which are in progress already. We'll discuss some of them if you guys are alright with all of this. Regards, Carl Poirier
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