How To Contribute
*****************

**You are very welcome to contribute!** *PyInstaller* is a maintained
by a group of volunteers. All contributions, like community support,
bug reports, bug fixes, documentation improvements, enhancements and
ideas are welcome.

*PyInstaller* is an free software project that is created and
maintained by volunteers. It lives-and-dies based on the support it
receives from others, and the fact that you're even considering
contributing to *PyInstaller* is very generous of you.

Since as of now all core-developers are working on PyInstaller in
their spare-time, you can help us (and the project) most if you are
following some simple guidelines. The higher the quality of your
contribution, the less work we have incorporating them and the earlier
we will be able to incorporate them :-)

If you get stuck at any point you can ask on the PyInstaller Email
List or create a ticket on GitHub.

For more about our development process and methods, see the
Development Guide.


Some ideas how you can help
===========================

Some ideas how you can help:

* **Subscribe** to the mailing list (low traffic) or **join** the IRC
  channel and share your experience or answer questions from the
  community.

* **Answer** **support tickets:** Often the user just needs to be
  pointed to the fitting section in the manual.

* **Triage** **open issues,** which means: read the report; ask the
  issue requester to provide missing information and to try with the
  latest development version; ensure there is a *minimal* example;
  ensure the issue-reporter followed all steps in When Things Go
  Wrong. If you are able reproduce the problem and track down the bug,
  this would be a *great* help for the core developers.

* **Help improving the documentation:** There is a list of
  documentation issues you can pick one from. Please provide a pull-
  request for your changes. Read more »»

* **Pick an** **issue requesting a pull-request** and provide one.

* **Review** **pull requests:** Are the commit messages following the
  guideline Please Write Good Commit Messages; do all new files have a
  copyright-header (esp. for hooks this is often missing); is the code
  okay; etc.

* Scan the list of open issues and pick some task :-)

Thank you very much!

If you plan to contribute frequently, just ask for write access to the
main git repository. We would be glad to welcome you in the team!


Sponsorship and  Project Grant
------------------------------

Please consider sponsoring *PyInstaller* development, especially if
your company benefits from this project.

We welcome your patronage on Bountysource:

* Contribute a recurring amount to the team

* Place a bounty on a specific feature

Your contribution will go towards adding new features to *PyInstaller*
and making sure all functionality continues to meet our high quality
standards.

A grant for contiguous full-time development has the biggest impact
for progress. Periods of 3 to 10 days allow a contributor to tackle
substantial complex issues which are otherwise left to linger until
somebody can’t afford to not fix them.

Contact Hartmut Goebel to arrange a grant for a core contributor.

Huge thanks to all the companies and individuals who financially
contributed to the development of *PyInstaller*. Please send a PR if
you’ve donated and would like to be listed on the web-site.
