[chef-dev] Obvious Patch Policy and New Home for Contribution Guidelines

[Daniel DeLeo < >]

Hi Chefs,

A few updates on our contribution process for you.

First of all, we've adopted an "Obvious Fix" policy, where small patches no longer require a CLA. In general we require a CLA because we take seriously our responsibility to protect everyone using Chef from the (very real in today's environment) risk of legal problems caused by misused intellectual property. That said, it's been a sore point for some contributors, especially those fixing typos in documentation and such, to have to fill out a CLA for such small changes. For those of us reviewing contributions, this has been difficult to navigate because we have backgrounds in development, operations, technical support, and a myriad of other disciplines that are not law.

So we worked with our in-house legal staff to come up with an "obvious fix" policy which provides a set of guidelines that both contributors and code reviewers can use to get these types of patches accepted more quickly and with less fuss.

Second of all, we've moved our main "how to contribute" content to docs.opscode.com. We will continue to use CONTRIBUTING.md files on individual repositories, since these integrate nicely with github's UI. You can find the new document here:

http://docs.opscode.com/community_contributions.html

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Daniel DeLeo