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Contributing Obvious Widgets

So, you want to contribute to the Obvious project? Well of course you do! I guess that's pretty clear. I mean, anyone could tell, right? Obviously.

...

So lets get started.

Patching An Existing Widget

If you want to just improve our existing widgets by adding settings and features, it's pretty easy. Some things to watch out for:

  • Style! Make sure that the code you write fits with the general style of the widget. In particular, you should use the same indentation pattern that the code uses. Also, trailing whitespace is bad. Try to avoid adding space at the ends of lines. This wastes bytes and is considered poor form. Anyway, you probably get the idea.
  • Clarity. Your code should be easy to understand, maintainable, and modularized. You should also avoid code duplication wherever possible by adding functions. If something is unclear, and you can't write it in such a way that it will be clear, explain it with a comment.
  • Regressions. Please test your changes before submitting to make sure that not only they work, but have not broken other parts of the widget!
  • Options. If you add or remove options, make sure the top-level README file reflects the changes. See "Adding A New Widget"'s section on this.

Adding A New Widget

It's also understandable that people want to add their own widgets to the Obvious repository. That's fantastic. Adding your useful widgets to Obvious makes them available for everyone. However, there are a few things that you need to know about the structure of Obvious. Note that a lot of the stuff from the section "Patching An Existing Widget" also apply here.

File Structure

obvious
|
|-- init.lua
|
|-- battery
|   |
|   |-- init.lua
|   `-- readme
.

In general, Obvious widgets are laid as above. The main file, obvious/init.lua has the definition of the Obvious module in general. When adding a new widget, you want to also add it to this file. The name that you want to add is the same as the folder you'll be making.

Then, you want to make that folder. In the example above, that is "battery". Inside the folder, you want to have at least "init.lua" and "readme". The init.lua file will be run first, the readme explains to the user what your module does and how to implement it, as well as any settings. Feel free to add more .lua files in the folder if you need them.

Your init.lua

This is your main file for your widget. Add other files if necessary for the sake of organization, but this is all you really need. Refer to other modules and documentation for how to write this kind of file. In general, the structure is:

  • Get variables and modules from the rc.lua and Awesome
  • Declare your module
  • Write your code using the variables defined
  • Write your public settings interface (see below)

Your settings

For settings, we have the standard that your module must have a collection of functions named set_<setting>. These are the access to the module's settings and can otherwise be whatever you want.

These then are used from the rc.lua like:

obvious.module.set_something(foo)

And that should be all it takes for the user.

Your data

If the widget gathers nontrivial data (i.e. wlan signal strength, battery charge, but not the current time, as that's just one function call away), you should supply a function called get_data() which returns nil on failure and a hashtable with the collected data otherwise. This is so other people can build on your work (the true spirit of open source, right? :P) and create different ways of visualizing the data gathered by your widget without duplicating code (which is why your widget should also use the get_data() function).

Top-level init file

If someone does require("obvious"), the behaviour is to import all widgets. The way this is accomplished is by making an "obvious" module that requires all of the sub-modules. In short, if you've created a new sub-module, you should add your sub-module to the list of things that is required by the init.lua in the root folder.

Top-level README

The top-level README is an overview of what features each widget sub-module supports and provides. It is a listing of the options available and what views it supports (like text-only, progress bar, etc.). When creating a new widget, you should add your overview to the top-level README.

Your readme

Your "readme" is the explanation for the user. As such, it has a rough layout:

  • Widget Name
  • Description of widget.
  • Explanation of available settings.
  • Explanation of how to integrate it into your rc.lua.

The exact way you do this doesn't matter, but please try to stick to this kind of ordering/layout.

Submitting Your Changes

Once you've written a tidy, well-fitting, clear patch with no bugs, you should submit it. We'd seriously love to have it. Some ways:

  • Commit it and use git-format-branch to create a patch-email. Then send this e-mail to one of the developers of obvious if you can find their e-mails, or to one of the awesome mailing lists which we tend to read. We then can take it, read it, possibly reply to it with suggestions for improvement, or apply it to the obvious project.
  • You can put your changes into your own personal git repo on the web and request a pull. Use the command git request-pull for this. This makes a bit of formatted text that tells us what changes you've made and where to get it. Again, e-mail this text up to us somewhere.
  • Also, we're generally pretty laid back. If we know you, trust you to write decent code, and know that you want to help regularly, we can probably just agree to give you commit access to the main Obvious repo.