Thank you for contributing to mlatu! It is very important to us that the community is involved in the codebase and changes made; we don't want to fall into a "Benevolent Dictator for Life" model.
Pull requests are very welcome. For major changes, please open an issue first to discuss what you would like to change. You can also join the Discord server listed on the README for help setting up and making changes, as well as asking questions about the codebase.
To create a local copy of mlatu with all necessary dependencies, you will need to install Rust and Erlang. To install Rust, follow the instructions at https://rustup.rs. To install Erlang, you can find a download at https://www.erlang.org/downloads.
To contribute to mlatu, it's easiest to install the GitHub CLI tool (instructions are at https://github.com/cli/cli#installation). After installation, authenticate yourself by running gh auth login. Then, fork and download a local copy of the repository by running gh repo fork mlatu-lang/mlatu.
Now, make any changes you wish to include in the PR. Make sure to run cargo fmt and cargo clippy to make sure formatting is correct and there are no lint warnings. To commit your changes, run git add * and git commit -m "Commit message". Don't worry too much about the commit message being descriptive, as we will squash the commits before we merge. Then run gh repo sync to sync with the online version.
Once you are satisfied with your changes, create a pull request by running gh pr create. This will prompt you for the title and the body of the pull request. Please make the title short and descriptive of the changes you've made. The description can be longer and should note any issues this pull request should close, any remaining issues, and anything the mlatu-lang team should know. This will output a URL where you can view the changes you've made and any comments made on that pull request.
Once the pull request is created, one of the mlatu-lang team members will come take a look at your changes and approve or request changes. If the pull request is approved, it will be merged into main. That's success! If there are changes requested, we'd ask that you do your best to fix them (asking clarifying questions or for help if you need it is great), and then we will review again.
If you are a new contributor, we ask that you would read over the AUTHORS file and add your own name and email to the file, in the same pull request.