Contributing to Merlin Models

If you are interested in contributing to Merlin Models, your contributions will fall into three categories:

You want to report a bug, feature request, or documentation issue:
- File an issue and describe what you encountered or what you want to see changed.
- The NVIDIA-Merlin team evaluates the issues and triages them, scheduling them for a release. If you believe the issue needs priority attention, comment on the issue to notify the team.
You want to propose a new feature and implement it:
- Post about your intended feature to discuss the design and implementation with the NVIDIA-Merlin team.
- Once we agree that the plan looks good, go ahead and implement it, using the code contributions guide below.
You want to implement a feature or bug-fix for an outstanding issue:
- Follow the code contributions guide below.
- If you need more context on a particular issue, please ask and the NVIDIA-Merlin team will provide the context.

Code contributions

Your first issue

Read the project's README.md to learn how to setup the development environment.
Find an issue to work on. The best way is to look for the good first issue or help wanted labels.
Comment on the issue to say that you are going to work on it.
Code! Make sure to update unit tests!
When done, create your pull request.
Verify that CI passes all status checks. Fix if needed.
Wait for other developers to review your code and update code as needed.
After your pull request is reviewed and approved, an NVIDIA-Merlin team member merges it.

Remember, if you are unsure about anything, don't hesitate to comment on issues and ask for clarifications!

Seasoned developers

After you have your feet wet and are comfortable with the code, you can look at the prioritized issues of our next release in our project boards.

Pro Tip: Always look at the release board with the highest number for issues to work on. This is where the NVIDIA-Merlin developers also focus their efforts.

Look at the unassigned issues, and find an issue you are comfortable with contributing to. Start with Step 3 from above, commenting on the issue to let others know that you are working on it. If you have any questions related to the implementation of the issue, ask them in the issue instead of the PR.

Label your PRs

This repository uses the release-drafter action to draft and create our change log.

Please add one of the following labels to your PR to specify the type of contribution and help categorize the PR in our change log:

breaking -- The PR creates a breaking change to the API.
bug -- The PR fixes a problem with the code.
feature or enhancement -- The PR introduces a backward-compatible feature.
documentation or examples -- The PR is an addition or update to documentation.
build, dependencies, chore, or ci -- The PR is related to maintaining the repository or the project.

By default, an unlabeled PR is listed at the top of the change log and is not grouped under a heading like Features that groups similar PRs. Labeling the PRs so we can categorize them is preferred.

If, for some reason, you do not believe your PR should be included in the change log, you can add the skip-changelog label. This label excludes the PR from the change log.

For more information, see .github/release-drafter.yml in the repository or go to https://github.com/release-drafter/release-drafter.

Adding classes, methods, and so on

If you add a class, method, or function, make an update to docs/source/api.rst to reference your change. If you remove one of these items, please also remove it from the same api.rst file.

In this second case, you probably want to mark your PR with the breaking label when you open the PR.

Please make sure to build the documentation by following the guidance in docs/README.md and check that you do not introduce any build errors or warnings.

The following line is an example of a warning. Check that the specified class, CachedCrossBatchSampler is still part of the software or remove it from api.rst and label your PR with the breaking label.

WARNING: [autosummary] failed to import 'merlin.models.tf.CachedCrossBatchSampler': no module named merlin.models.tf.CachedCrossBatchSampler

Also look for warnings that report mistakes with formatting docstrings:

merlin/models/merlin/models/tf/blocks/retrieval/base.py:docstring of merlin.models.tf.blocks.retrieval.base.DualEncoderBlock.__ini
t__:11: WARNING: Unexpected indentation.

TIP: To add a link from a docstring to class documentation in the Merlin Core repository, specify the fully qualified class name and prefix it with a tilde like the following example:

Parameters
----------
schema : ~merlin.schema.Schema
    The `Schema` with the input features
deep_block: Block
    Block (structure) of deep model.

The Intersphinx extension truncates the text to Schema and makes it a link.

Attribution

Portions adopted from https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md

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