Contribution Guidelines

Thank you for deciding to contribute to this project :)
Please follow these guidelines when implementing your code.

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Change workflow

The main branch contains the latest version of the code. This branch must be stable and working at any time. To ensure this CI pipelines are used.

The workflow is the following:

create a branch on the main repository with an explicit name
create a merge request from your branch against the main branch
a pipeline is created each time you push commits in a merge request but it will not start automatically: the user may start it. Since a merge request cannot be merged until the associated pipeline passed, start the blocked pipeline associated with the latest commit in your merge request when your change is ready.
if the pipeline passed, the merge request may be merged by one of the maintainers. Note that the preferred option is to squash commits.

Note: more information about the pipeline is available in the CI file.

The code is still based on the design of the alpha version so the coding style is not mature yet.
A redesign is planned but until then please:

document the usage of functions following Sphinx format
follow PEP 8 conventions. The compliance can be checked with pylint and the following commands:

python3 -m pip install -r misc/python_requirements.txt
python3 -m pylint --rcfile=misc/pylint-rcfile.txt

The pylint violations are also checked in the quality job.

More details are available in the CI file.

Note: pylint is run with python3 to have latest features whereas the add-on only supports Kodi v18 Leia (which uses python2)

These steps should be followed only by maintainers.

Create a release branch whose name follows this format: release/<release_name>
On this branch don't commit any new feature. Only commit changes related to the release process like:
- a bump of the add-on version in addon.xml (note that the version numbering must follow the semantic versioning)
- the update of the changelog in the news tag in addon.xml (using Markdown syntax since it will be re-used automatically in the release notes)
Merge the merge request (maintainers only)
A new pipeline with the job create-release will be created: run the job manually since it should be blocked (maintainers only)
The new release will be available on the releases page.