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Dec 20, 2025
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CONTRIBUTING: Add guidance on PR expectations. #386

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`CONTRIBUTING`: Add guidance on PR expectations.
toddjonker Dec 18, 2025
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Update CONTRIBUTING.md
toddjonker Dec 20, 2025
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29 changes: 29 additions & 0 deletions CONTRIBUTING.md
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Expand Up @@ -48,6 +48,34 @@ New syntactic forms are more advanced, since they require understanding Fusion
thoroughly.


## Pull Request Expectations

Before going further, we want you to understand what our team considers to be best practice.
These are cultural expectations, and following them yourself (while here, at least) will
accelerate merges and improve everyone's experience.

* Work incrementally. Review early, review often. Don't wait until the code is polished, get
feedback on where you're going to ensure that we have the same goals. There's nothing worse than
being asked to rework a lot of code, so don't be embarrassed by that sketchy first draft.

* Whenever possible, prefer small, single-topic PRs. We would much rather review multiple small PRs
than large combined changes. Not only are smaller changes easier to review, they are faster to
ship.

* Submit refactoring steps separately from behavior changes. We approach these categories with
different mindsets: for refactoring we (by definition) expect no behavioral change, in other
cases we are looking for a specific functional change.

* Our approach to AI use is cautious. Understand that you are responsible for your PR's content,
even if it's AI generated. We expect you to note where the AI contribution is non-trivial, and
especially if any manual prompting was involved. In general, we are aligned with the [Apache
Software Foundation's AI policy][asf] and require that commits be tagged `Generated-by:` when
they include non-trivial AI-generated content. See [this commit](233dfd8) for an example.

[asf]: https://www.apache.org/legal/generative-tooling.html
[233dfd8]: https://github.com/ion-fusion/fusion-java/commit/233dfd834fc36c91f5f813ea3b06c81e7fbd9b84


## What’s the process?

1. If a relevant GitHub issue exists, comment on it to indicate your interest. We'll help get you
Expand All @@ -70,6 +98,7 @@ thoroughly.
6. Upon approval, your PR will be merged by a code owner, and in most cases the change will be part
of the next release.


### Issue Management

We track all work items using GitHub issues, and sketch our roadmap using [milestones][]. Code
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