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CONTRIBUTING.md

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Contribution Guidelines

This document contains guidelines for contributing code to winit. It has to be followed in order for your patch to be approved and applied.

Contributing

Anyone can contribute to winit, however given that it's a cross platform windowing toolkit getting certain changes incorporated could be challenging.

To save your time it's wise to check already opened pull requests and issues. In general, bug fixes and missing implementations are always accepted, however larger new API proposals should go into the issue first. When in doubt contact us on Matrix or via opening an issue.

Submitting your work and handling review

All patches have to be sent on Github as pull requests. To simplify your life during review it's recommended to check the "give contributors write access to the branch" checkbox.

Handling review

During the review process certain events could require an action from your side, common patterns and reactions are described below.

Event: The CI fails to build, but it looks like it is not your fault. Not communicating so could result in maintainers not looking into your patch, since they may assume that you're still working on it.
Desired behaviour: Write a message saying roughly the following "The CI failure is unrelated", so that the maintainers will fix it for you.

Event: Maintainer requested changes to your PR.
Desired behavior: Once you address the request, you should re-request a review with GitHub's UI. If you don't agree with what maintainer suggested, you should state your objections and re-request the review. That will indicate that the ball is on maintainer's side.

Event: You've opened a PR, but maintainer shortly after commented that they want to work on that themselves.
Desired behavior: Discuss with the maintainer regarding their plans if they were not outlined in the initial response, because such response means that they are not interested in reviewing your code. Such thing could happen when underestimating complexity of the task you're solving or when your patch mandate certain downstream designs. In general, the maintainer will likely close your PR in order to prevent work being done on it.

Maintainers

Winit has plenty of maintainers with different backgrounds, different time available to work on Winit, and reasons to be winit maintainer in the first place. To ensure that Winit's code quality does not decrease over time and to make it easier to teach new maintainers the "winit way of doing things" the common policies and routines are defined in this section.

The current maintainers for each platform are listed in this file.

Contributions handling

The maintainers must ensure that the external contributions meet Winit's quality standards. If it's not, it is the maintainer's responsibility to bring it on par, which includes:

  • Ensure that formatting is consistent and CHANGELOG messages are clear for the end users.
  • Improve the commit message, so it'll be easier for other maintainers to understand the motivation without going through all the discussions on the particular patch/PR.
  • Ensure that the proposed patch doesn't break platform parity. If the breakage is desired by contributor, an issue should be opened to discuss with other maintainers before merging.
  • Always fix CI issues before merging if they don't originate from the submitted work.

However, maintainers should give some leeway for external contributors, so they don't feel discouraged contributing, for example:

  • Suggest a patch to resolve style issues, if it's the only issue with the submitted work. Keep in mind that pushing the resolution yourself is not desired, because the contributor might not agree with what you did.
  • Be more explicit on how things should be done if you don't like the approach.
  • Suggest to finish the PR for them if they're absent for a while and you need the proposed changes to move forward with something. In such cases the maintainer must preserve attribution with Co-authored-by, Suggested-by, or keep the original committer.
  • Rebase their work for them when massive changes to the Winit codebase were introduced.

When reviewing code of other maintainers all of the above is on the maintainer who submitted the patch. Interested maintainers could help push the work over the finish line, but teaching other maintainers should be preferred.

For a regular contributor to winit, the maintainer should slowly start requiring contributor to match maintainer quality standards when writing patches and commit messages.

Contributing

When submitting a patch, the maintainer should follow the general contributing guidelines, however greater attention to detail is expected in this case.

To make life simpler for other maintainers it's suggested to create your branch under the project repository instead of your own fork. The naming scheme is github_user_name/branch_name. Doing so will make your work easier to rebase for other maintainers when you're absent.

Administrative Actions

Some things (such as changing required CI steps, adding contributors, ...) require administrative permissions. If you don't have those, ask about the change in an issue. If you have the permissions, discuss it with at least one other admin before making the change.

Release process

Given that winit is a widely used library, we should be able to make a patch releases at any time we want without blocking the development of new features.

To achieve these goals, a new branch is created for every new release. Releases and later patch releases are committed and tagged in this branch.

The exact steps for an exemplary 0.2.0 release might look like this:

  1. Initially, the version on the latest master is 0.1.0
  2. A new v0.2.x branch is created for the release
  3. Update released cfg_attr in src/changelog/mod.rs to v0.2.md
  4. Move entries from src/changelog/unreleased.md into src/changelog/v0.2.md
  5. In the branch, the version is bumped to v0.2.0
  6. The new commit in the branch is tagged v0.2.0
  7. The version is pushed to crates.io
  8. A GitHub release is created for the v0.2.0 tag
  9. On master, the version is bumped to 0.2.0, and the changelog is updated

When doing a patch release, the process is similar:

  1. Initially, the version of the latest release is 0.2.0
  2. Checkout the v0.2.x branch
  3. Cherry-pick the required non-breaking changes into the v0.2.x
  4. Follow steps 4-9 of the regular release example