Github Issue and Pull Request Templates

Hi everyone! I am Shanee and I’m with Open@RIT. We have been working with Prof. Steven Yi on developing community guidelines and resources to streamline contributions and community engagement. While we are new to the Csound community, many of our recommendations come from popular open source theory such as Nadia Eghbal’s Working in Public book. These suggestions are simply recommendations from us and we hope to start some productive conversations around how we can create a better and more effective Csound community.

We think it’s worth talking about github issues and pull request templates which pre-populate the form with a standard set of information and requirements that people see before creating an issue or pull request. There’s a number of pre-created templates to base your work off online GitHub - stevemao/github-issue-templates: A collection of GitHub issue and pull request templates.

Some important things to focus on when creating github issue/PR templates are:
• What is the information you want from someone submitting an issue?
o For bug reports common things are
Development environment
Steps to reproduce
o New features
What kinds of new features are you interested in maintaining
What kinds aren’t you?
Is the submitter willing to contribute? Does that affect the above answers?
o Questions
You can link to other more Q&A friendly areas with this
• What is a checklist that you often follow prior to submitting your own PRs?
o Did you run the tests?
o Did you build the codebase?

I think this is a great idea. Github looks to support multiple template types:

I think we might try to direct Q&A kinds of messages to the Forum/Mailing List/Discord. Perhaps this is something to consider in terms of ways to shape the template.