Add a CONTRIBUTING doc

[Karen Tracey]

​https://github.com/blog/1184-contributing-guidelines

Seems this would be helpful to point people in the right direction as to when it's best to open a ticket vs. just opening a pull request.

[Alex Gaynor]

Since we already have an actual document (in a real documentation system), let's just have a CONTRIBUTING file that has a link to the real docs.

[Preston Holmes]

I concur with Alex - I feel the current contributing docs are actually quite good, and we just need to point people there.

I've put together a draft, and verified that there is no problem using an .rst document

​https://gist.github.com/3741235

[Preston Holmes <preston@…>]

In 70248cce0a8a3144df9f36e15fbeb5cc1b091c3e:

Fixed #18971 -- added root level CONTRIBUTING doc

[Karen Tracey]

This isn't showing up on github as described in the referenced github blog entry. That entry only mentions the names CONTRIBUTING and CONTRIBUTING.md, ours is CONTRIBUTING.rst, possibly that is the problem?

[Preston Holmes]

I had tested this with one of my other repos before pushing and .rst isn't the issue - after another quick experiment - it looks like the issue is that you need the contributing doc in the branch from where you are opening the pull request. I'd say that is a bit of a shortcoming of the github feature, but not in our control.

If you git cherry-pick 70248cce0a8a3144df9f36e15fbeb5cc1b091c3e from your branch (assuming your master is current), push the branch, then attempt to open the pull request, you'll see the banner, the link is to the version of the doc in your fork, another reason it is nice to refer to our published docs - because they can be current even if the fork was stale.

[Karen Tracey]

Ah. Thanks for the explanation...