Contribute

Testing and reporting errors¶

If you would like CsoundQt to become even better, the first thing to do is:

Please take time to report errors and feature requests in the CsoundQt issue tracker!

It is even more valuable if you build CsoundQt yourself. It is not that hard, also on macOS! There are extensive instructions in BUILDING.md and in the CsoundQt wiki.

Contribute to improve the code, examples or design¶

CsoundQt's sources are hosted in Github. Since version 0.9.2 the latest stable release is kept in the master branch, the newest modifications and fixes in the develop branch. To contribute to the development, please check out the develop branch. On Github you can select the branch from the menu (Branch: master/develop), on your computer use

$ git checkout -b develop origin/develop

to activate the develop branch the first time. To change between the branches use git checkout <branchname>:

$ git checkout develop # or: git checkout master

If you would like to add an example, correct some mistakes or work on improving or extending the source code, the best way is forking the repository and making pull requests:

Sign up or sign in to Github: https://github.com/
Go to the repository https://github.com/CsoundQt/CsoundQt (or just search for CsoundQt). In the upper part of the page there is a Fork button. Press it and a copy of the repository will be created under your account (like tarmoj/CsoundQt).
You can make smaller changes online - when you select a file on the Github page, press the pen-shaped "Edit this file" button and make your changes. After finishing editing, enter a comment about the change below in the Commit changes box and press Commit changes. You can also add new files from scratch or upload files and commit them in a similar way.
If you have more serious work to do, you need to get the sources to your computer where you can write or edit code, various files, test and, when happy with the result, send it back to your github repository. To do that:
you need the git versioning system software and some knowledge of how to use it. See https://git-scm.com/
getting the sources from github to your computer is called "cloning" in git terms. Go to the directory where you want to have the local repository and execute in the terminal:
```
$ git clone https://github.com/tarmoj/CsoundQt.git # replace with your address, of course
```
When your changes are done, you need to commit the changes to your local repository (it is easy to do in QtCreator in Tools → Git → Local repository → Commit). For the command line see https://git-scm.com/docs/git-commit. For example:
```
$ git add 'file_you_changed'
$ git commit -m "some meaningful message about the change"
```
Sending your changes to the remote repository (i.e. the one under your account in Github) is called pushing:
```
$ git push
```
Next time you want to get the newest version from github again (if there has been a change), you don't need to clone; getting the change information is called pulling:
```
$ git pull
```
To integrate your changes into the main CsoundQt repo, you need to make a so-called pull request - it means that the manager(s) of the main repo get information about your work and can merge it easily into the main sources so everybody can enjoy the result of your effort. Just click on the "Pull request" button on your Github repo's main page, add a comment and send it.

Improve the webpage¶

CsoundQt's webpage is also hosted on github and you can use a similar forking and pull request system as with the main code. Have a look at the instructions at https://github.com/CsoundQt/csoundqt.github.io/blob/master/README.md.

Support CsoundQt¶

If you find CsoundQt useful, please consider making a donation: SourceForge donation page.