CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing

Thank you for your interest in audiowaveform!

We love hearing feedback from people who use our software, so if you are using this for something interesting, please let us know.

Contributions are welcomed and encouraged. If you're thinking of writing a new feature, please first discuss the change you wish to make, either by raising an issue, or contacting us directly, e.g., by email.

We may not always be able to respond immediately to feedback, so please bear with us and have patience.

Making changes

• If we agree with your feature proposal, we'll work with you to develop and integrate the feature.

• Please avoid making commits directly to your copy of the master branch. This branch is reserved for aggregating changes from other people, and for mainline development from the core contributors. If you commit to master, it's likely that your local fork will diverge from the upstream repository.

• Before working on a change, please ensure your local fork is up to date with the code in the upstream repository, and create a feature branch for your changes.

• We may want to make minor changes to your pull request before merging, so please ensure that the Allow edits from maintainers option on your feature branch is enabled.

• Please don't change the VERSION file, or update CHANGELOG.md. We'll do that when preparing a new release.

• Please follow the existing coding conventions.

• Code or documentation contributions produced by generative AI tools are not allowed.

• For commit messages, please follow these guidelines, although we're not fussy about use of imperative mood vs past tense. In particular, please don't use Conventional Commits style. We may choose to edit your commit messages for consistency when merging.

• Please add test cases for your feature, and ensure all tests are passing (make test).

• When merging a feature branch, we may choose to squash your commits so that the feature is merged as a single logical change.

Preparing a new release

• When it's time to publish a new release version, create a single commit on master with the following changes only:

  • Increment the version number in VERSION.

  • Describe the new features in this release in CHANGELOG.md.

  • Update the debian changelog.

• Tag this commit using the form X.Y.Z and push the commit using git push origin master --tags.

• In GitHub, create a Release from this tag, with the tag name as Release title, i.e., X.Y.Z.

• Publish the source package to Launchpad using the packaging script.

• Update the Homebrew formula.

• Compile Windows binaries using compile-static-audiowaveform and upload to the GitHub Release page.

• Build RPM and Debian packages and upload to the GitHub Release page.