Contributing to redlines

First off, thanks for taking the time to contribute! ❤️

All types of contributions are encouraged and valued. See the Table of Contents for different ways to help and details about how this project handles them. Please make sure to read the relevant section before making your contribution. It will make it a lot easier for us maintainers and smooth out the experience for all involved. The community looks forward to your contributions. 🎉

And if you like the project, but just don’t have time to contribute, that’s fine. There are other easy ways to support the project and show your appreciation, which we would also be very happy about:

• Star the project
• Tweet about it
• Refer this project in your project’s readme
• Mention the project at local meetups and tell your friends/colleagues

Table of Contents

• Code of Conduct
• I Have a Question
• I Want To Contribute
• Reporting Bugs
• Suggesting Enhancements
• Your First Code Contribution
• Improving The Documentation
• Styleguides
• Commit Messages
• Join The Project Team

Code of Conduct

This project and everyone participating in it is governed by the CONTRIBUTING.md Code of Conduct. By participating, you are expected to uphold this code. Please report unacceptable behavior to <houfu@OUTLOOK dot sg>.

I Have a Question

If you want to ask a question, we assume that you have read the available Documentation.

Before you ask a question, it is best to search for existing Issues that might help you. In case you have found a suitable issue and still need clarification, you can write your question in this issue. It is also advisable to search the internet for answers first.

If you then still feel the need to ask a question and need clarification, we recommend the following:

• Open an Issue.
• Provide as much context as you can about what you’re running into.
• Provide project and platform versions (python version, platform like streamlit, colab etc), depending on what seems relevant.

We will then take care of the issue as soon as possible. (As we work on this in our free time, fixes and reviews may take a while, but we usually respond first within days.)

I Want To Contribute

Legal Notice

When contributing to this project, you must agree that you have authored 100% of the content, that you have the necessary rights to the content and that the content you contribute may be provided under the project license.

Reporting Bugs

Before Submitting a Bug Report

A good bug report shouldn’t leave others needing to chase you up for more information. Therefore, we ask you to investigate carefully, collect information and describe the issue in detail in your report. Please complete the following steps in advance to help us fix any potential bug as fast as possible.

• Make sure that you are using the latest version.
• Determine if your bug is really a bug and not an error on your side e.g. using incompatible environment components/versions (Make sure that you have read the documentation. If you are looking for support, you might want to check this section).
• To see if other users have experienced (and potentially already solved) the same issue you are having, check if there is not already a bug report existing for your bug or error in the bug tracker.
• Also make sure to search the internet to see if users outside of the GitHub community have discussed the issue.
• Collect information about the bug:
  • Stack trace (Traceback)
  • OS, Platform and Version (Windows, Linux, macOS, x86, ARM)
  • Python version, runtime environment, package manager, depending on what seems relevant.
  • Possibly your input and the output
• Can you reliably reproduce the issue? And can you also reproduce it with older versions?

How Do I Submit a Good Bug Report?

You must never report security related issues, vulnerabilities or bugs including sensitive information to the issue tracker, or elsewhere in public. Instead sensitive bugs must be sent by email to <houfu@OUTLOOK dot sg>.

We use GitHub issues to track bugs and errors. If you run into an issue with the project:

• Open an Issue. (Since we can’t be sure at this point whether it is a bug or not, we ask you not to talk about a bug yet and not to label the issue.)
• Explain the behavior you would expect and the actual behavior.
• Please provide as much context as possible and describe the reproduction steps that someone else can follow to recreate the issue on their own. This usually includes your code. For good bug reports you should isolate the problem and create a reduced test case.
• Provide the information you collected in the previous section.

Once it’s filed:

• The project team will label the issue accordingly.
• A team member will try to reproduce the issue with your provided steps. If there are no reproduction steps or no obvious way to reproduce the issue, the team will ask you for those steps and mark the issue as needs-repro. Bugs with the needs-repro tag will not be addressed until they are reproduced.
• If the team is able to reproduce the issue, it will be marked needs-fix, as well as possibly other tags (such as critical), and the issue will be left to be implemented by someone.

Suggesting Enhancements

This section guides you through submitting an enhancement suggestion for CONTRIBUTING.md, including completely new features and minor improvements to existing functionality. Following these guidelines will help maintainers and the community to understand your suggestion and find related suggestions.

Before Submitting an Enhancement

• Make sure that you are using the latest version.
• Read the documentation. carefully and find out if the functionality is already covered, maybe by an individual configuration.
• Perform a search to see if the enhancement has already been suggested. If it has, add a comment to the existing issue instead of opening a new one.
• Find out whether your idea fits with the scope and aims of the project. It’s up to you to make a strong case to convince the project’s developers of the merits of this feature. Keep in mind that we want features that will be useful to the majority of our users and not just a small subset. If you’re just targeting a minority of users, consider writing an add-on/plugin library.

How Do I Submit a Good Enhancement Suggestion?

Enhancement suggestions are tracked as GitHub issues.

• Use a clear and descriptive title for the issue to identify the suggestion.
• Provide a step-by-step description of the suggested enhancement in as many details as possible.
• Describe the current behavior and explain which behavior you expected to see instead and why. At this point you can also tell which alternatives do not work for you.
• You may want to include screenshots and animated GIFs which help you demonstrate the steps or point out the part which the suggestion is related to. You can use this tool to record GIFs on macOS and Windows, and this tool or this tool on Linux.
• Explain why this enhancement would be useful to most users. You may also want to point out the other projects that solved it better and which could serve as inspiration.

Your First Code Contribution

Be relaxed and open to comments. We are all here to learn and grow together.

Improving The Documentation

The Documentation is contained in the python source files as docstrings. Edit them directly. Please be clear, concise and respectful in your tone.

To preview documentation, clone the project, install the development dependencies, then run npm install && npm run dev in site/ — the dev server regenerates the API reference from your docstrings before it starts.

Documentation

Documentation is published from site/, an Astro Starlight project that serves the hand-written pages and, under /api/, the API reference that pdoc generates from docstrings. See ADR-0026 for why, and ADR-0027 for the shape of the agent-facing pages.

How It Works

• The site deploys on every push to main, and again when a release is published. A documentation fix does not have to wait for a release; the consequence is that /api/ documents main rather than the last tag.
• Every pull request builds the site without deploying it, so a release is never the first time the site is built.
• A broken site never blocks a release. The website workflow is separate from the packaging workflows, nothing depends on it, and it must not be made a required status check.

To Update Documentation

• API reference: edit the docstrings in redlines/. They remain the source of truth; pdoc renders them and nothing under site/public/api/ should be edited by hand — it is generated and not committed.
• Everything else: edit the pages under site/src/content/docs/.

Docstring conventions

Two conventions, both there for the same reason: the API reference generator is expected to change at M4, and these keep that a configuration change rather than a rewrite of every docstring written between now and then.

• Write docstrings in reST style — :param name:, :type name:, :return:, :rtype: — which is what the package already uses throughout. Do not mix in Google or numpy sections. Both pdoc and griffe, the extractor every plausible successor is built on, read reST; a mixed codebase means one of them renders half the parameters as literal text.
• Do not add @private to a docstring. It is a pdoc-specific pragma that no other generator recognises: under griffe the member reappears in the reference with a literal @private line in its body. To keep something out of the published reference, use __all__, or raise it in the pull request so the module can be excluded by configuration. The nine existing pragmas in redlines/cli.py are doing a real job for pdoc today and stay until the generator changes; the rule is about not adding a tenth.

Building the site locally

cd site
npm install
npm run dev      # runs pdoc first, then serves on http://localhost:4321/redlines/

npm run build does the same for a production build, and npm run api regenerates only the pdoc output. All three need the Python development environment (uv sync --all-extras --dev) available in the repository root.

Written documentation

Not everything belongs in a docstring. docs/ holds the documents that are written by hand rather than generated:

• docs/adr/ — architecture decision records: why a design choice was made, what was rejected, and when to revisit it. Adding a decision means adding a file here; see docs/adr/README.md for the conventions.
• docs/PRD.md — what redlines 1.0 is and who it is for.
• docs/competitive-landscape-2026-08.md — the survey the 1.0 decisions rest on.
• ROADMAP.md — which release each feature lands in.

Styleguides

For code, we use the Black formatter. Please be encouraged to use that too when submitting code contributions.

Please write tests to explain your work.

Please ensure all the tests pass before we can consider mergining your work.

Commit Messages

It’s helpful to use a “verb” (like add, fix etc) and a short description of what you are trying to accomplish.

Join The Project Team

Please [email me](mailto:houfu@OUTLOOK dot sg) or file an issue.

Attribution

This guide is based on the contributing.md. Make your own!