Thanks for wanting to contribute! There are many ways to contribute and we appreciate any level you're willing to do.

Need some new functionality to help? You can let us know by opening an issue. It's helpful to look through all issues in case it's already being talked about.

Please let us know about what problems you run into, whether in behavior or ergonomics of API. You can do this by opening an issue. It's helpful to look through all issues in case it's already being talked about.

Looking for an idea? Check our issues. If the issue looks open ended, it is probably best to post on the issue how you are thinking of resolving the issue so you can get feedback early in the process. We want you to be successful and it can be discouraging to find out a lot of re-work is needed.

Already have an idea? It might be good to first create an issue to propose it so we can make sure we are aligned and lower the risk of having to re-work some of it and the discouragement that goes along with that.

As a heads up, we'll be running your PR through the following gauntlet:

• warnings turned to compile errors
• cargo test
• rustfmt
• clippy
• rustdoc
• committed as we use Conventional commit style
• typos to check spelling

Not everything can be checked automatically though.

We request that the commit history gets cleaned up.

We ask that commits are atomic, meaning they are complete and have a single responsibility. A complete commit should build, pass tests, update documentation and tests, and not have dead code.

PRs should tell a cohesive story, with refactor and test commits that keep the fix or feature commits simple and clear.

Specifically, we would encourage

• File renames be isolated into their own commit
• Add tests in a commit before their feature or fix, showing the current behavior (i.e. they should pass). The diff for the feature/fix commit will then show how the behavior changed, making the commit's intent clearer to reviewers and the community, and showing people that the test is verifying the expected state.
  • e.g. clap#5520

Note that we are talking about ideals. We understand having a clean history requires more advanced git skills; feel free to ask us for help! We might even suggest where it would work to be lax. We also understand that editing some early commits may cause a lot of churn with merge conflicts which can make it not worth editing all of the history.

For code organization, we recommend

• Grouping impl blocks next to their type (or trait)
• Grouping private items after the pub item that uses them.
  • The intent is to help people quickly find the "relevant" details, allowing them to "dig deeper" as needed. Or put another way, the pub items serve as a table-of-contents.
  • The exact order is fuzzy; do what makes sense

Pre-requisites

• Running cargo login
• A member of rust-cli:Maintainers
• Push permission to the repo
• cargo-release

When we're ready to release, a project owner should do the following

1. Update the changelog (see cargo release changes for ideas)
2. Determine what the next version is, according to semver
3. Run cargo release -x <level>