How to contribute to image-rs

Welcome! When you are reading this, chances are, you are wondering about contributing. The joyful news is that this is easy, and simple. You need not even have written any line of code.

Code of Conduct

Follow the Code of Conduct. In less elaborate terms, keep the community welcoming and respectful to all and disagree calmly, encourage productive experimentation and fresh ideas. This also applies to the gitter channels.

Membership and Teams

There are four basic groups within the organization:

Group	Permissions	Responsibilities	Requirements
anyone	A personal blog page and issue administration	-	None, simply ask to be added
Collaborator	Write access to repositories, create repos	None, PR help and reviews appreciated	Successfully get a PR merged
Publish	Ownership on `crates.io`	Finalizing releases and publishing new versions	Invite only
Admin	Managing teams	Ensure PR progress, Resolve conflicts, Arbitrate	Distinguished community member

We use the issue tracker for most tasks. We try to plan as much as possible up front and break the tasks down into 'Easy' tasks. You do not necessarily need to know a lot about Rust to work on the project. Even organizational work, improved documentation, and planning help greatly in progressing the project.

The most common way of contributing is by creating an issue or PRs. You do not need write access, you do not have to be added as collaborator. If you need write access to a specific repository and you for some reason do not want to join one of the above teams, people in the Admin group can also invite you as an outside collaborator.

The image-rs project is devised as a community project. In contrast to other large projects it is not particularly backed by a larger entity. This means that to ensure progress, your help is required but also that each individual's input is valued. Division into teams is done mostly to manage risks from a security perspective and to ensure that users of the crates can have trust in the libraries' integrity. The judgement of experience and helpfulness is made informally by the people sending the invitation, in cases of doubt please contact an admin. Membership may be removed without warning if suspicious activity is discovered.

If, after a successful contribution, you are not added as collaborator, post a message here. When you are a collaborator you can assign issues to yourself, make commits and merges to the repository and also create new projects. Maybe also look around and see if there are unassigned issues that fit your skill, or even ones that challenge yourself. Offer feedback to other contributors that seek it.

Types of contributions

Feel free to open issues, post comments about progress, questions, new ideas, brain storming etc. You can edit comments as a way of refining ideas in the issue tracker. Many issues needs to be broken down into new issues before they can be implemented. Please add comments like "can copy code from X" that tells other people how you do it efficiently.

If you have an idea how to make collaboration better, open an issue.

We also have a blog and a webpage to track our progress. Any member of the organization is free to contribute! This includes and encourages personal reports, essays, and notices about usage of the library, possible future directions or design goals. These will be considered when progress reports (every ~3 months) or update project focus (every ~1 year).

A note about code formatting and `rustfmt`

Consistent formatting can make code more legible and reduces contribution overhead. Unfortunately, the rustfmt tool does not always perform particularly well in this regard, especially for large projects. Therefore, it can sometimes even be a roadblock as small changes may affect disproportionate amounts of code which then leads to discussions on syntax that it was supposed to help avoid. You can read more in-depth opinions in the internals thread.

So what's the policy? When a project is small enough or recent then we'll try to use fmt and add it to CI. But for the large, main image project it is not really a good fit—introducing it would format a seventh of all code and definitely requires manual review 1. This may of course change in the future. If it becomes possible to use it with less aggressive settings, e.g. to only format and order imports, we'll revise this section and try to agree on a common configuration file.

Getting started with coding

Here is how you get started (using the image repository as an example):

Fork the respective repository.
Clone your repository to the local hard drive (GitHub for Mac, Github for Windows).
Open up the Terminal and navigate to the project directory.
If you have not installed Rust yet, download it here.
Type cargo build to build the library.

You work against the fork as you would do with personal projects. When you want review of your code, open up a pull request on Github. Even if it is just a small change, a PR makes it easier for other people to follow the changes.

Donations

If you feel charitable, your best option at this moment is to support a local charity of your choice. Should you happen to run across one of the contributors at a conference you could also offer to buy them a drink or coffee.

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