CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing to river

Contributing is as simple as opening a pull request on codeberg. You'll likely have more success with your contribution if you visit #river on irc.libera.chat to discuss your plans first.

Commit messages

Please take the time to write a good commit message, having a clean git history makes maintaining and contributing to river easier. Commit messages should start with a prefix indicating what part of river is affected by the change, followed by a brief summary.

For example:

build: scan river-status protocol

or

river-status: send view_tags on view map/unmap

In addition to the summary, feel free to add any other details you want preceded by a blank line. A good rule of thumb is that anything you would write in a pull request description on codeberg has a place in the commit message as well.

For further details regarding commit style and git history see weston's contributing guidelines.

Coding style

Please follow the Zig Style Guide and run zig fmt before every commit. With regards to line length, keep it under 100 columns in general but prioritize readability over adhering to a strict limit. Note that inserting a trailing comma after the last parameter in function calls, struct declarations, etc. will cause zig fmt to wrap those lines. I highly recommend configuring your editor to run zig fmt on write.

The single additional style rule is to avoid writing if statements and similar across multiple lines without braces:

test {
    // avoid this
    if (foo)
        bar();

    // prefer this
    if (foo) bar();

    // or this
    if (foo) {
        bar();
    }
}

On a higher level, prioritize simplicity of code over nearly everything else. Performance is only a valid reason for code complexity if there are profiling results to back it up which demonstrate a significant benefit.