Thank you for considering contributing to MALVIRUS. We are a small team and MALVIRUS is an emerging project, thus we are aware that something can go wrong (bugs) and many aspects can be improved (both on the architecture and on the analysis pipeline). Any kind of contribution is welcome.
We'll do our best to assist you in using MALVIRUS, fixing errors you could encounter or assessing changes you kindly propose. In return we hope you'll follow these guidelines as a sign that you respect the time we dedicate to this project.
We are open to all ideas and we want to get rid of bugs! Use the Issues section to either report a new issue, provide your ideas or contribute to existing threads. Issues can be either about errors while using MALVIRUS or about unexpected results of the analysis. Ideas can be either about the architecture, the UI or the analysis pipeline itself. We are also open to contributions to the code and to the documentation. In this case, discuss with us any sizeable change before starting to implement/write it: we don't want you waste your time!
We do not have (yet) a dedicated space for asking for support: open an issue even if you are not sure that you encountered a bug of MALVIRUS. We ask you to clearly mark the issue you opened as a Support Request, so that we can address your needs as soon as we can.
Feel free to send an e-mail to any member of the MALVIRUS team if you don't want to open a public issue (for example, if you want to discuss about undisclosed/sensitive data). We promise to keep our communications confidential.
No matter why you open an issue, search among the other issues (still open or already closed) if any other user has (or had) a similar error or idea. If you find a similar issue, contribute to that thread: in that way we can better help you and the other user(s).
If no other issue is similar to your case, go ahead and open a new issue. Please be as much complete as possible and use one of the issue templates we prepared if it fits well to your case (otherwise, open a blank issue).
In any case, when filing an issue for reporting a bug, make sure to answer these five questions:
- What version of MALVIRUS are you using?
- What operating system (and version) are you using?
- What version (and flavour) of Docker are you using?
- What did you do?
- What did you expect to see?
- What did you see instead?
By the way, you can also help us by improving our issue templates or adding a new one!
To contribute to the code or the documentation, clone the repository locally and make the changes you wish. You can test changes locally by starting the container with the provided run.sh script (that builds and runs the container). When you are satisfied with the changes, open a pull request linked to the relevant issue(s) you opened (if any): we will try to assess the change and to review the code as soon as possible. Keep changes as small as possible, preferably one change per pull request.
You don't have to sign a Contribution License Agreement to contribute to MALVIRUS. However, keep in mind that our code is licensed under the GPL-3.0-or-later and we expect that contributions will be licensed under the same terms.
Any contribution will be properly acknowledged.
tl;dr: Please be polite and respectful to other users' work and time.