CONTRIBUTING.md 3.4 KB

How to contribute to Apache Arrow

Did you find a bug?

The Arrow project uses JIRA as a bug tracker. To report a bug, you'll have to first create an account on the Apache Foundation JIRA. The JIRA server hosts bugs and issues for multiple Apache projects. The JIRA project name for Arrow is "ARROW".

To be assigned to an issue, ask an Arrow JIRA admin to go to Arrow Roles, click "Add users to a role," and add you to the "Contributor" role. Most committers are authorized to do this; if you're a committer and aren't able to load that project admin page, have someone else add you to the necessary role.

Before you create a new bug entry, we recommend you first search among existing Arrow issues.

When you create a new JIRA entry, please don't forget to fill the "Component" field. Arrow has many subcomponents and this helps triaging and filtering tremendously. Also, we conventionally prefix the issue title with the component name in brackets, such as "[C++] Crash in Array::Frobnicate()", so as to make lists more easy to navigate, and we'd be grateful if you did the same.

Did you write a patch that fixes a bug or brings an improvement?

First create a JIRA entry as described above. Then, submit your changes as a GitHub Pull Request. We'll ask you to prefix the pull request title with the JIRA issue number and the component name in brackets. (for example: "ARROW-2345: [C++] Fix crash in Array::Frobnicate()"). Respecting this convention makes it easier for us to process the backlog of submitted Pull Requests.

Minor Fixes

Any functionality change should have a JIRA opened. For minor changes that affect documentation, you do not need to open up a JIRA. Instead you can prefix the title of your PR with "MINOR: " if meets the following guidelines:

  • Grammar, usage and spelling fixes that affect no more than 2 files
  • Documentation updates affecting no more than 2 files and not more than 500 words.

Do you want to propose a significant new feature or an important refactoring?

We ask that all discussions about major changes in the codebase happen publicly on the arrow-dev mailing-list.

Do you have questions about the source code, the build procedure or the development process?

You can also ask on the mailing-list, see above.

Further information

Please read our development documentation.