[Biopython-dev] Adding a CONTRIBUTING.rst file for GitHub?

[Peter Cock]

Dear Biopythoneers,

Some of you may be aware of the GitHub convention of
having a file name CONTRIBUTING (or CONTRIBUTING.md
or I assume CONTRIBUTING.rst) in the root folder which gets
shown to people automatically during a pull request etc:

https://github.com/blog/1184-contributing-guidelines

I think we should do this too, and can move/copy some
of the content from the contributing chapter of the
tutorial: Doc/Tutorial/chapter_contributing.tex

Assuming it works, I would prefer CONTRIBUTING.rst since
we already use restructured text for Python docstrings etc.

Given this is a plain text file, we could include it in the
source code releases (via the MANIFEST.in file).

Does this seem like a good idea? Does anyone want to
write a draft (based on the LaTeX file)?

Thanks,

Peter

P.S. At this point, is *.rst widely used enough that we
could simply rename README to README.rst (and
get rid of the symlink used to get it rendered on the
main GitHub page?)