winit/CONTRIBUTING.md

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 upstream 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 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.

Creating commits

When creating a commit, follow these general rules:

• Try to limit the first line (title) of the commit message to 50 characters, but not more than 60 characters.
• The commit starts with an uppercase latter and everything else must be lowercase, unless you quote a symbol, like Window.
• Use the body of the commit message to actually explain what your patch does and why it is useful. Even if your patch is a one line fix, the description is not limited in length and may span over multiple paragraphs. Use proper English syntax, grammar and punctuation. The body is generally wrapped at 72 characters.
• If you're a downstream user and your fixing your issue, consider to link it like Links: URL in the end of the commit message.
• Try to address only one issue/topic per commit.
• Prefer describing your changes in imperative mood, e.g. "make xyzzy do frotz" instead of "[This patch] makes xyzzy do frotz" or "[I] changed xyzzy to do frotz", as if you are giving orders to the codebase to change its behaviour.
• When fixing an issue from https://github.com/rust-windowing/winit/issues, ensure to have it include in the end of the commit. See other commits on how it's done.
• When in doubt, follow the format and layout of the recent existing commits.

The maintainers will fixup your commit message when applying the patch, but it's still recommended to follow the rules above to make the life of maintainers easier.

If you want to communicate something to reviewers, but it doesn't belong to the commit message, write that under -- on PR body. Your PR could look like:

TITLE (matches commit title)

Body (matches commit body)

--

Your arbitrary message goes here.

Various checkboxes PR template required you to fill.

Handling review

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

Event: The CI fails to build, but it looks like not your fault. Not communicating so, could result into maintainers not looking into your patch, unless they CI that CI pass.
Desired behavior: Write a message saying roughly the following "The CI failure is unrelated", so maintainers will fix it for you.

Event: Collaborator requested review on your PR.
Desired behavior: Once you address the request, you should re-request review with the github's UI. If you don't agree with what maintainer suggested, you should object that 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: Discusses with maintainer 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.

Maintainers

Winit has plenty of maintainers with different backgrounds, experience level, and reasons to be winit maintainer in the first place. To ensure that winit's code quality is not decreasing 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 maintainer must ensure that the external contributions meet the winit's quality standards. If it's not, it is maintainer's responsibility to bring it on par, which includes:

• Decline the patch if it tries to achieve short term goals instead of solving the problem in general. In such case maintainer must communicate that as early as possible, so contributors don't spend their time on something that won't be accepted in the end.
• 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, maintainer must always give a 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 contributor might not agree with what you did.
• Be more explicit on how things should be done if you doesn't like the approach.
• Suggest to finish PR for them if they're absent for a while and you need the proposed changes to move forward with something. In such case maintainer must preserve attribution with Co-authored-by, Suggested-by, or keep the original commiter.
• Rebase their work for them when massive changes to 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.

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

Contributing

When submitting a patch maintainer should follow the general contributing guidelines, however all soft rules (e.g Try to), become strict.

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.

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. In the branch, the version is bumped to v0.2.0
4. The new commit in the branch is tagged v0.2.0
5. The version is pushed to crates.io
6. A GitHub release is created for the v0.2.0 tag
7. 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 3-7 of the regular release example