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Contribution process

Before contributing

For nontrivial changes, we encourage people to discuss these before opening a PR. This gives the Reference team a chance to understand your idea better and ensure it fits with the intended direction of the Reference. Typically, you should file an issue or start a thread on Zulip before submitting a pull request.

Contributing process overview

The general outline of a contribution is as follows:

  1. Check out the source.
  2. Install mdbook.
  3. Learn to build the book locally.
  4. Make your changes to the source files. Be sure to follow all the guidelines in this book for styling, conventions, etc.
  5. Run the tests.
  6. Submit a pull request
  7. The PR will go through the review process.
    • See Review Policy for the types of reviews it may undergo.
    • This may take a while, as the team has limited time.
  8. Once approved, a team member will merge the change.
    • The team may apply editorial changes before merging.
    • It may take a few weeks for the change to appear on the nightly website. See Publishing for more details.

Office hours

The lang-docs team holds office hours on Tuesdays at 3:30 PM US/Eastern. We meet on Jitsi Meet. Check the Zulip channel for the latest status and availability.

Zulip

There are channels on Zulip for discussions about the Reference:

Working on issues

When an issue is labeled with Help Wanted, the team is asking for contributions to help address it.

If you want to work on an issue, you can assign yourself by commenting @rustbot claim. See Issue Assignment for more information.

New features

See Stabilization for information on how to document new features.

Minor changes

Minor changes — such as small corrections, wording cleanup, and formatting fixes — can be made simply by opening a PR.

Major changes

Major changes — such as large rewrites, reorganizations, and new chapters — should be discussed with and approved by the Reference team first. Open an issue (if there isn’t already one) to discuss the kinds of changes you are interested in. When the Reference team is able, they will work with you to approve or give feedback on the change.

Submitting a pull request

When submitting a pull request, please follow these guidelines:

  • Include a clear description of what the change is and why it is being made.
  • Keep a clean git history; each commit should explain the reason for the change.
  • Use GitHub’s keywords in the description to automatically link to an issue if the PR resolves it. For example, saying Closes #1234 will link issue #1234 to the PR. When the PR is merged, GitHub will automatically close the issue.

When your PR is submitted, GitHub automatically runs all tests. The GitHub interface shows a green checkmark if these pass or a red X if they fail. Links to the logs are available on the PR page to diagnose any issues.

PR labeling

PRs are marked with labels such as S-waiting-on-review and S-waiting-on-author to indicate their status. Anyone can use the @rustbot bot to adjust the labels. If a PR is marked as S-waiting-on-author and you have pushed new changes that you would like reviewed, you can comment on the PR with @rustbot ready. The bot will switch the labels on the PR.

More information about these commands can be found at the shortcuts documentation.