This guide documents the various ways to contribute to NCBI Datasets, including information about how we handle pull requests.
We encourage you to contribute to NCBI Datasets by opening new GitHub issues to report bugs or request features in addition to proposing code modifications via the pull request process. While we may not be able to implement all feature requests, this feedback can help inform future work on NCBI Datasets.
Submitting a bug report is one of the simplest and most useful ways to contribute, as it helps us to quickly identify and fix issues.
Report a bug using the New issue button on the issues page. A good bug report should include a clear and concise description of the bug and a reproducible example, with steps to reproduce the behavior, with any relevant identifiers. When possible, before submitting a bug report, please try to verify that you are able to reproduce the problem by ruling out common issues such as network connectivity interruptions.
The NCBI Datasets team will triage the bug reports and assign an internal priority based on the extent and impact of the issue. Due to limited resources, not all bug reports will be handled immediately for a variety of reasons (such as a planned redesign, inability to reproduce the problem, etc.). All reports, however, are useful feedback for the team and help inform the project as it moves forward.
We encourage feature requests. Please be aware that not all feature requests can be supported immediately, but all requests help the team plan and design future improvements to the software.
When requesting a new feature, please provide a clear and concise description of the feature you would like and any details about the problem this would solve for you. It is especially important to include information on how this would fit into your workflow in order to understand the context of the request. Often solutions to a feature request are implemented differently than an end-user may expect due to infrastructure or other issues.
Our build system is not yet capable of incorporating code changes in a PR into the NCBI Datasets command-line tools.
However, we are happy to review and consider code changes in a PR and will credit you in our release notes if we decide to incorporate the suggested code changes into our tools.
Here is what you can expect if you create a PR:
- We will review and discuss internally whether to incorporate the suggested code change
- If we decide to change the code based on your suggested change, we will credit you in our release notes and close the PR