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Contributing to OpenFX

Thank you for your interest in contributing to OpenFX. This document explains our contribution process and procedures.

For a description of the roles and responsibilities of the various members of the OpenFX community, see GOVERNANCE, and for further details, see the project's Technical Charter. Briefly, Contributors are anyone who submits content to the project, Committers review and approve such submissions, and the Technical Steering Committee provides general project oversight.

Getting Information

There are several ways to connect with the OpenFX project:

  • The openfx-discussion mail list: This is our primary mailing list, intended for techical discussion and help implementing and using OpenFX.

  • GitHub Issues: GitHub Issues are used both to track bugs and to discuss feature requests.

  • Slack channel

How to Ask for Help

The best places to start if you have questions about implementing, using, or extending OpenFX are the mailing list and our Slack.

How to Report a Bug

OpenFX use GitHub's issue tracking system for bugs and enhancements: https://github.com/ofxa/openfx/issues

If you are submitting a bug report, please be sure to note which plug-in(s) and host products are involved, what OS and compilers you're using, aany special build flags or other unusual environmental issues). Please give a specific account of

  • what you tried
  • what happened
  • what you expected to happen instead

with enough detail that others can reproduce the problem.

How to Request a Standard Change

Open a GitHub issue: https://github.com/ofxa/openfx/issues.

Describe the goal and the proposed feature in as much detail as possible. Standard change requests will almost certainly spawn a discussion among the project community.

How to Report a Security Vulnerability

If you think you've found a potential vulnerability in OpenFX, please refer to [SECURITY.md] to responsibly disclose it.

How to Contribute a Bug Fix or Change

To contribute code to the project, first read over the GOVERNANCE page to understand the roles involved. You'll need:

  • A good knowledge of git.

  • A fork of the GitHub repo.

  • An understanding of the project's development workflow.

  • Legal authorization, that is, you need to have signed a Contributor License Agreement. See below for details.

Legal Requirements

OpenFX is a project of the Academy Software Foundation and follows the open source software best practice policies of the Linux Foundation.

License

OpenFX is licensed under the BSD-3-Clause license. Contributions to the library should abide by that standard license.

Contributor License Agreements

We do not require a CLA at this time.

Commit Sign-Off

Every commit must be signed off. That is, every commit log message must include a “Signed-off-by” line (generated, for example, with “git commit --signoff”), indicating that the committer wrote the code and has the right to release it under the BSD-3-Clause license. See https://github.com/AcademySoftwareFoundation/tac/blob/main/process/contributing.md#contribution-sign-off for more information on this requirement.

Development Workflow

Git Basics

Working with OpenFX requires understanding a significant amount of Git and GitHub based terminology. If you’re unfamiliar with these tools or their lingo, please look at the GitHub Glossary or browse GitHub Help.

To contribute, you need a GitHub account. This is needed in order to push changes to the upstream repository, via a pull request.

You will also need Git installed on your local development machine. If you need setup assistance, please see the official Git Documentation.

Repository Structure and Commit Policy

The OpenFX repository uses a simple branching and merging strategy.

All development work is done directly on the main branch. The main branch represents the bleeding-edge of the project and most contributions should be done on top of it.

After sufficient work is done on the main branch and the OpenFX leadership determines that a release is due, we will bump the relevant internal versioning and tag a commit with the corresponding version number. Each Minor version also has its own “Release Branch”, e.g. RB-1.1. This marks a branch of code dedicated to that Major.Minor version, which allows upstream bug fixes to be cherry-picked to a given version while still allowing the main branch to continue forward onto higher versions. This basic repository structure keeps maintenance low, while remaining simple to understand.

To reiterate, the main branch represents the latest development version, so beware that it may include untested features and is not generally stable enough for release. To retrieve a stable version of the source code, use one of the release branches.

The Git Workflow

This development workflow is sometimes referred to as OneFlow. It leads to a simple, clean, linear edit history in the repo.

Use the Fork, Luke.

In a typical workflow, you should fork the OpenFX repository to your account. This creates a copy of the repository under your user namespace and serves as the “home base” for your development branches, from which you will submit pull requests to the upstream repository to be merged.

Once your Git environment is operational, the next step is to locally clone your forked OpenFX repository, and add a remote pointing to the upstream OpenFX repository. These topics are covered in the GitHub documentation Cloning a repository and Configuring a remote for a fork, but again, if you need assistance feel free to reach out on the [email protected] mail list.

Pull Requests

Contributions should be submitted as Github pull requests. See Creating a pull request if you're unfamiliar with this concept.

The development cycle for a code change should follow this protocol:

  1. Create a topic branch in your local repository, following the naming format "feature/" or "bugfix/".

  2. Make changes, compile, and test thoroughly. Code style should match existing style and conventions, and changes should be focused on the topic the pull request will be addressing. Make unrelated changes in a separate topic branch with a separate pull request.

  3. Push commits to your fork.

  4. Create a Github pull request from your topic branch.

  5. Pull requests will be reviewed by project Committers and Contributors, who may discuss, offer constructive feedback, request changes, or approve the work.

  6. Upon receiving the required number of Committer approvals (as outlined in Required Approvals), a Committer other than the PR contributor may merge changes into the main branch.

Code Review and Required Approvals

Modifications of the contents of the OpenFX repository are made on a collaborative basis. Anyone with a GitHub account may propose a modification via pull request and it will be considered by the project Committers.

Pull requests must meet a minimum number of Committer approvals prior to being merged. Rather than having a hard rule for all PRs, the requirement is based on the complexity and risk of the proposed changes, factoring in the length of time the PR has been open to discussion. The following guidelines outline the project's established approval rules for merging:

  • Changes to the OpenFX Standard, that is, changes to the main header files in [include], including new suites, new properties, or incompatible modifications to existing suites, go through a Standard Process which involves these steps:

  • Proposal

  • Discussion

  • Implementation (by one plug-in and one host)

  • Documentation

  • Approval

For all other changes:

  • Core design decisions, large new features, or anything that might be perceived as changing the overall direction of the project should be discussed at length in the mail list before any PR is submitted, in order to: solicit feedback, try to get as much consensus as possible, and alert all the stakeholders to be on the lookout for the eventual PR when it appears.

  • Small changes (bug fixes, docs, tests, cleanups) can be approved and merged by a single Committer.

  • Big changes that can alter behavior, add major features, or present a high degree of risk should be signed off by TWO Committers, ideally one of whom should be the "owner" for that section of the codebase (if a specific owner has been designated). If the person submitting the PR is him/herself the "owner" of that section of the codebase, then only one additional Committer approval is sufficient. But in either case, a 48 hour minimum is helpful to give everybody a chance to see it, unless it's a critical emergency fix (which would probably put it in the previous "small fix" category, rather than a "big feature").

  • Escape valve: big changes can nonetheless be merged by a single Committer if the PR has been open for over two weeks without any unaddressed objections from other Committers. At some point, we have to assume that the people who know and care are monitoring the PRs and that an extended period without objections is really assent.

Approval must be from Committers who are not authors of the change. If one or more Committers oppose a proposed change, then the change cannot be accepted unless:

  • Discussions and/or additional changes result in no Committers objecting to the change. Previously-objecting Committers do not necessarily have to sign-off on the change, but they should not be opposed to it.

  • The change is escalated to the TSC and the TSC votes to approve the change. This should only happen if disagreements between Committers cannot be resolved through discussion.

Committers may opt to elevate significant or controversial modifications to the TSC by assigning the tsc-review label to a pull request or issue. The TSC should serve as the final arbiter where required.

Test Policy

OpenFX does not yet have an automated CI or test process.

Copyright Notices

All new source files should begin with a copyright and license stating:

//
// SPDX-License-Identifier: BSD-3-Clause
// Copyright (c) Contributors to the OpenFX Project.
//

Third-party libraries

The standard itself should not depend on any third-party library or headers. It must be pure C code.

For the C++ examples and wrappers, C++11 std is recommended, but no other third-party libraries should be used except for special purposes such as image processing for particular examples.

Comments and Doxygen

The standard is documented in the header files, and the comments there are used to auto-generate the reference documentation. So correct, concise and clear documentation is absolutely vital. Since this is a standard and not just a library, code reviews will focus as much on the documentation as the code itself.

To build the docs, follow the Documentation/README.md instructions.