cosmopolitan/CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing Guidelines

We'd love to accept your patches! Please read this guide first.

Identity Disclosure

This project does not accept anonymous contributions. Justine Tunney won't merge pull requests from strangers. In order to change the Cosmo codebase, and have your changes be upstreamed, she has to know who you are. You're encouraged to disclose your full name and email address to the public too, by including them in your git commit messages; however that's not a requirement; as we're happy to respect the wishes of contributors who prefer to remain anonymous to the public.

Copyright Assignment

The first time you send a pull request, you need to send an email to Justine Tunney jtunney@gmail.com stating that you intend to assign her the copyright to the changes you contribute to Cosmopolitan. It only needs to happen once. This only applies to the code you choose to contribute. The email should be sent from an email address associated with your identity. Your email should link to your pull request.

To make things easy, here's an example of a good email you can use:

From: YOUR NAME (yname@gmail.com)
To: Justine Tunney (jtunney@gmail.com)
Subject: Cosmopolitan Copyright Assignment for YOUR NAME

Hi Justine,

I made my first contribution to Cosmopolitan in https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/pull/XXXX could you please take a look? I intend to assign you the copyright to the changes I contribute to Cosmopolitan.

Thanks!

Please note that in order to give Justine the copyright, it has to be yours to give in the first place. If you're employed, then you should get your employer's approval to do this beforehand. Even with big companies like Google, this process is quick and painless. Usually we see employers granting authorization in less than one day.

If you live in a country that doesn't recognize one's ability to assign copyright, then you may alternatively consider disclaiming it using the language in Unlicense or CC-0.

If you're checking-in third party code, then you need to have headers at the top of each source file (but never header files) documenting its owners and the code should go in the third_party/ folder. Every third party project should have a README.cosmo file that documents its provenance as well as any local changes you've made.

Copyright Policy Exceptions

Tests

You're encoraged to claim ownership of your test code. If you add a new file under the test/ directory, then you should put your name in the ISC license header at the top of the file. If you add new test cases to an existing unit test file, then you're encouraged to append a line with your name to the existing copyright header of that file.

Exceptional Features

Let's say you discovered a faster better way to implement log10() and you want to give it to Cosmopolitan. In cases like this, it really isn't appropriate for Justine to own your code. What you could do instead, is write your own new and improved log10.c from scratch, put your name on the top with the ISC license, and then add a __notice() directive so that your name will be embedded inside every executable that links the log10() function. This will help you get your name out there. Please note you need get approval from Justine each time you want to do this.

Style Guide

You can use clang-format to automatically format your files:

clang-format -i -style=file tool/net/redbean.c

If you use Emacs this can be automated on save for Cosmopolitan using tool/emacs/cosmo-format.el.