CONTRIBUTING

Lewis Van Winkle
Tulip Charts LLC
LV@tulipcharts.org


##Basics and Formalities

You'd like to help contribute to this project? Excellent!

If your contribution is going to be more than a simple typo fix or a couple
lines of code, I'll need a few things from you first:

1) You should contact me and we can discuss the changes you propose. Bug fixes
are always welcome and appreciated! Generally, I'll also welcome new indicator
contributions if they have at least some history of real world usage. This
isn't the place to put completely new or untested indicators. I'll also require
at least some published reference material on how the indicator works.

2) You'll need to assign your copyright to Tulip Charts LLC. Email me for the
assignment form. This is so we can enforce the free software license terms
against infringements in the future. If you are employed in the software
industry, we may also need a copyright release from your employer. I know this
is a pain, but it's how all the big free software projects do it. I am trying
to take this very seriously from day one. I don't want to have to track down a
bunch of contributions many years from now to clean up the legal paperwork.

3) Try to follow the established coding convention present in the files. Spaces,
not tabs. Unix line endings.

4) Add your name to AUTHORS if your contribution is more than a few lines.

5) Consider providing documentation.

6) You can get the code to me on Github or by emailing a patch. Whatever works.

7) When in doubt, ask. I'm friendly.


##New Indicator Contributions

A) If you're contributing a new indicator, you'll need to add it to
indicators.tcl first. Try to make a good choice for the category, input,
options, and output names. Use the same option names and order of existing
indicators if possible. If you add an entirely new option name, some of the
testing code will also need updated (e.g. in doc.tcl). You'll need Tcl
installed to run indicators.tcl. When you run it, it will generate a NAME.c
file in the indicators directory that you can put your code in.
indicators.tcl also automatically updates the header files and the
indicator index.

B) For new indicators, please add some tests to extra.txt. If possible, use
published numbers from the indicator author. Add some comments.

C) Make sure you can get past the fuzzer without crashing.