Add a contributing guide, mostly about the corpus tests - #350
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Nothing told a contributor that a second test suite exists, that it needs several gigabytes of browser profiles this repository does not carry, or that the corpus is published openly and needs no token to fetch. Two recent pull requests moved a baseline without touching it, which is what that gap looks like from the outside. Covers setup, the split between the unit suite and the corpus suite, where the corpus lives and how to point the tests at one or all of its roots, and what to do when a change moves a baseline: regenerate it deliberately and say what moved, or work out why it moved if you cannot explain it. Also says plainly that skipping the corpus is fine as long as the pull request says so. The skipping behaviour is the part worth writing down. A green `pytest tests/` says nothing about the corpus tests, because without HINDSIGHT_TEST_CORPUS they do not run at all.
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Nothing in the repo tells a contributor that a second test suite exists, that it needs several gigabytes of browser profiles that are not committed here, or that the corpus is published openly and takes no token to fetch. Two recent pull requests moved the magnet.ctf_2018 baseline without touching it, which is what that gap looks like from the outside.
CONTRIBUTING.md covers setup, the split between the unit suite and the corpus suite, where the corpus lives and how to point the tests at one root or all six, and what to do when a change moves a baseline. It repeats the rule from generate_baselines.py: regenerate deliberately and say what moved, never to turn a build green. It also says that skipping the corpus is fine as long as the pull request says so, since nobody is going to pull 6 GB for a one line fix.
The part worth writing down is the skip. A green
pytest tests/says nothing about the corpus tests, because without HINDSIGHT_TEST_CORPUS they never ran.README gets a link to it under Feature Requests.
I checked the instructions rather than only writing them: the download URL returns 200, the quoted skip message is what the suite actually prints, and
HINDSIGHT_TEST_CORPUS_ROOTS=magnet.ctf_2018selects the one root and finishes in about five seconds.One bullet in the pull request section is a preference rather than existing policy, the one about keeping descriptions in plain prose. Drop it if you would rather not put that in writing.