Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
105 lines (63 loc) · 7.51 KB

CONTRIBUTING.md

File metadata and controls

105 lines (63 loc) · 7.51 KB
Raw

UsTaxes Contributing Guide

Before contributing please make sure to take a moment to read through the Code of Conduct, as well as relevant documentation for the contribution you intend to make:

Maintaining team

Issue Reporting Guidelines

  • The issue list of this repo is for bug reports and feature requests. Please come to the Discord chat with general questions you may have.

  • If your issue is resolved but still open, please close it. In case you found a solution by yourself, it could be helpful to explain how you fixed it.

  • Generally, there are many features still remaining to produce a valid 1040 for most people. We hope you will view this project in light of your individual circumstances and expertise and contribute accordingly! For example, if you have a certain type of income or receive a certain credit or deduction, and those are not yet implemented, we would happily assist you in implementing those features.

Pull Request Guidelines

  • For code security, we require signed commits. If you haven't set up signed commits yet, please do the following:

    • Follow this Github tutorial

    • To ensure all your commits are signed going forward, git config --global commit.gpgsign true,

    • If you have unsigned commits that you would like to sign, you can do so by rebasing. git rebase master, followed by git commit --amend to redo each commit on the branch.

  • The only requirement is that your PR is well described and your intentions are clearly communicated.

  • If adding new feature, provide some clear reason to add this feature.

  • If fixing a bug:

    • If you are resolving a special issue, add Fixes: #xxx (#xxx is the issue id) in your PR body. When your PR is merged, the maintainer will move this information into the final commit message for our release log.
    • Provide detailed description of the bug in the PR, or link to an issue that does.

  • These are just some formatting suggestions, we won't call you out for not following them:

    • Start commits with a capital letter and imperative mood, no period at the end.
    • Each commit first line should be max 50 characters, followed by a blank line.
    • Wrap following lines at 80 characters.
    • Include as much detail as you need in the following lines.
    • Github PR title style is the same as commit first line style.

  • It's OK to have multiple small commits as you work on the PR - we apply squash merges to all PRs at the end. In particular, you are free to rebase your commits so long as your pull request is in draft status. As soon as you take it out of draft status, request a review, or receive a review on your pull request, please do not rebase or force push.

Development Guide

General Setup

First, join our Discord server and let us know that you want to contribute. This way we can point you in the right direction and help ensure your contribution will be as helpful as possible.

  1. To set up your machine for development, review the Architecture doc, for required links to set up NPM 8 and Rust.

  2. Next, fork and clone this repo.

  3. Run npm ci to install the package versions referenced in package-lock.json. If your feature requires a new dependency, add it using npm install <package-name>@<version> to avoid affecting other dependencies in package-lock.json.

Try

  • npm run desktop to try out the desktop application. Setting the environment variable BROWSER=none will stop the web browser from also loading for you.
  • npm run start will serve the site locally on port 3000, so you can view it at localhost:3000 in your browser.

Stack

This app uses Typescript React and Redux. The structure of this app should look familiar to you if you have used redux before, and it may seem opaque and confusing to you if you have not used Redux before. Here is a great guide you can use to learn to about redux

State Management

In order to manage state between many different components and concerns in a project, we dispatch actions that update a piece of state in a global state object. Each of these actions is received by a reducer that applies that change to the state variable. All of this logic is contained in src/redux.

  • src/redux/actions.ts: All the actions that can be sent to update our state
  • src/redux/data.ts: No functionality, just type definitions for our global state variable.
  • src/redux/reducer.ts: All logic for updating our global state.

Directories Overview

  • src/components Contains React forms and all UI.
  • src/data Contains static data such as a list of states and a list of tax brackets
  • src/irsForms
    • These are typescript model implementations of the actual IRS pdfs. Each form provides the data to be filled into the final PDF via an array where each index must match the expected index in the PDF. We use the convention that methods are named after the actual line referred to in the PDF. So const l1 = (): number = ... will be the function to call to get the numeric value needed on line 1 of that form.
    • Also, because the forms closely follow IRS published instructions and worksheets, the tax calculations are also coded in this directory.
  • pdfFiller: All the logic to actually fill form data into a PDF.
  • redux All the types and logic to manage global state in the app.
  • customTypes Special purpose definitions needed to give the typescript compiler more type information about some features of our dependencies we use. Ideally these needs would be provided by our dependencies and this folder can be deleted in the future.

License

UsTaxes is a GPL-licensed open source project. We think this choice is important for a few reasons

  • If anyone wants to use the software for any reason, they are welcome to.
  • If anyone wants to sell the software, they can, but they have to provide all the source so users can build the project themselves.
  • If someone wants to improve on the software and sell that, they can, but they also have to provide the source for all their improvements for free.

We believe this choice will help you know your contributions are valued and will be used responsibly.

Financial Contribution

If you do not have time to contribute to UsTaxes directly but would like to financially offer support, we have not yet set up a framework to allow that. We promise however that any future financial contributions will be public and without preconditions. So "I would like to provide support to develop support for itemized deductions" is fine, and contributions will be allocated towards those working on that feature. But "I would like to support the project provided you take steps x and y" or conditioned on us providing advertising or selling other services will not be ok. If you have any questions about that feel free to private message one of the maintainers on our discord.

This Contributor guide was adapted from the Tauri project's Contributing document