src/docs/src/contributing.rst
.. Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not .. use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of .. the License at .. .. http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0 .. .. Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software .. distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT .. WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the .. License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under .. the License.
.. _contributing:
The documentation lives in its own source tree. We'll start by forking and cloning the CouchDB documentation GitHub mirror. That will allow us to send the contribution to CouchDB with a pull request.
If you don't have a GitHub account yet, it is a good time to get one, they are free. If you don't want to use GitHub, there are alternate ways to contributing back, that we'll cover next time.
Go to https://github.com/apache/couchdb and click the "fork"
button in the top right. This will create a fork of CouchDB in your GitHub
account. If your account is username, your fork lives at
https://github.com/username/couchdb. In the header, it tells me my
"GitHub Clone URL". We need to copy that and start a terminal:
.. code-block:: bash
$ git clone https://github.com/username/couchdb.git
$ cd couchdb/src/docs
$ subl .
I'm opening the whole CouchDB documentation source tree in my favourite editor. It gives me the usual directory listing:
.. code-block:: bash
ebin/
ext/
.git/
.gitignore
images/
LICENSE
make.bat
Makefile
NOTICE
rebar.config
src/
static/
templates/
themes/
.travis.yml
The documentation sources live in src/docs/src, you can safely
ignore all the other files and directories.
First we should determine where we want to document this inside the
documentation. We can look through http://docs.couchdb.org/en/latest/
for inspiration. The JSON Structure Reference_ looks like a fine place to
write this up.
.. _JSON Structure Reference: http://docs.couchdb.org/en/latest/json-structure.html
The current state includes mostly tables describing the JSON structure (after all, that's the title of this chapter), but some prose about the number representation can't hurt. For future reference, since the topic in the thread includes views and different encoding in views (as opposed to the storage engine), we should remember to make a note in the views documentation as well, but we'll leave this for later.
Let's try and find the source file that builds the file
http://docs.couchdb.org/en/latest/json-structure.html -- we are in luck, under
share/doc/src we find the file json-structure.rst. That looks promising.
.rst stands for ReStructured Text (see
http://thomas-cokelaer.info/tutorials/sphinx/rest_syntax.html
for a markup reference), which is an ASCII format for writing
documents, documentation in this case. Let's have a look and open it.
We see ASCII tables with some additional formatting, all looking like the final HTML. So far so easy. For now, let's just add to the bottom of this. We can worry about organising this better later.
We start by adding a new headline::
Number Handling
===============
Now we paste in the rest of the main email of the thread. It is mostly text, but it includes some code listings. Let's mark them up. We'll turn::
ejson:encode(ejson:decode(<<"1.1">>)).
<<"1.1000000000000000888">>
Into::
.. code-block:: erlang
ejson:encode(ejson:decode(<<"1.1">>)).
<<"1.1000000000000000888">>
And we follow along with the other code samples. We turn::
Spidermonkey
$ js -h 2>&1 | head -n 1
JavaScript-C 1.8.5 2011-03-31
$ js
js> JSON.stringify(JSON.parse("1.01234567890123456789012345678901234567890"))
"1.0123456789012346"
js> var f = JSON.stringify(JSON.parse("1.01234567890123456789012345678901234567890"))
js> JSON.stringify(JSON.parse(f))
"1.0123456789012346"
into::
Spidermonkey::
$ js -h 2>&1 | head -n 1
JavaScript-C 1.8.5 2011-03-31
$ js
js> JSON.stringify(JSON.parse("1.01234567890123456789012345678901234567890"))
"1.0123456789012346"
js> var f = JSON.stringify(JSON.parse("1.01234567890123456789012345678901234567890"))
js> JSON.stringify(JSON.parse(f))
"1.0123456789012346"
And then follow all the other ones.
I cleaned up the text a little but to make it sound more like a documentation entry as opposed to a post on a mailing list.
The next step would be to validate that we got all the markup right. I'll leave this for later. For now we'll contribute our change back to CouchDB.
First, we commit our changes::
$ > git commit -am 'document number encoding'
[main a84b2cf] document number encoding
1 file changed, 199 insertions(+)
Then we push the commit to our CouchDB fork::
$ git push origin main
Next, we go back to our GitHub page https://github.com/username/couchdb and click the "Pull Request" button. Fill in the description with something useful and hit the "Send Pull Request" button.
And we're done!
When you make a change to the documentation, you should make sure that you follow the style. Look through some files and you will see that the style is quite straightforward. If you do not know if your formatting is in compliance with the style, ask yourself the following question::
Is it needed for correct syntax?
If the answer is No. then it is probably not.
These guidelines strive be simple, without contradictions and exceptions. The best style is the one that is followed because it seems to be the natural way of doing it.
The guidelines are in descending priority.
#. Syntax
#. Encoding
UTF-8.#. Line ending
\n.#. Line length
90 characters.#. Links
#. Indentation
4 spaces.#. Titles
The highest level titles in a file is over and underlined with =.
Lower level titles are underlined with the following characters in descending order::
= - ^ * + # ` : . " ~ _
Over and underline match the title length.
#. Empty lines