Developing

So you want to write code in Umlaut gem itself.

First, note that you may not have to for localization. The most common thing you'd want to do is add a new Service Plugin. You can add a new service plugin solely in your local app, and reference it in your umlaut_services.yml. However, if it's possibly useful to someone else, it would be great if you contributed it back to Umlaut, and that would require editing Umlaut source.

Or you may just want to explore the source and maybe even edit it experimentally, that's cool.

(Please note: You can edit Umlaut code to contribute a patch back to Umlaut, or experimentally. But you should not need to run your application live against locally edited Umlaut source code. If you do so, you have locally forked Umlaut, and it will make upgrading to future versions of Umlaut difficult. It should be possible to make any local changes you need with local configuration or over-rides located in your local app. If there's something that needs to be easier... well, that's indeed a reason to fix Umlaut to make it easier and contribute your fix back to Umlaut!)

Testing

Submitting a change

So you're not an Umlaut committer, but you'd like to submit a change back to Umlaut.

Fork in github, create a new "feature" branch in your forked github, and commit your changes there.

Then submit a github pull request back to Umlaut. See also http://www.mikeball.us/blog/how-to-contribute-to-a-project-hosted-on-github

Small single purpose pull requests are better than massive conglomerations. If you need massive changes, try to break them into steps and submit pull requests for smaller changes at a time.

Please feel free to ask for feedback on the umlaut listserv on your general approach before embarking on a massive change, to make sure you're working in a direction likely to be accepted.

Once you've contributed a quality change or two to Umlaut, odds are we'll make you a committer.

Releasing an Umlaut gem

Generally only done by project lead or what have you. Needs to have permissions set on rubygems for the umlaut gem.

We use the bundler-supplied rake tasks for releasing the gem. Update ./lib/umlaut/version.rb to desired version.

Then simply run: rake release

This will create a tag with version in umlaut git repo, as well as release the new version to rubygems.org.