Thank you for your interest in contributing to OpenColorIO. This document explains our contribution process and procedures, so please review it first:
- Get Connected
- Legal Requirements
- Getting Started
- Repository Structure
- Development and Pull Requests
- Coding Standards
- Test Policy
- Versioning Policy
- Creating a Release
For a description of the roles and responsibilities of the various members of the OpenColorIO 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.
The first thing to do, before anything else, is talk to us! Whether you're reporting an issue, requesting or implementing a feature, or just asking a question; please don’t hesitate to reach out to project maintainers or the community as a whole. This is an important first step because your issue, feature, or the question may have been solved or discussed already, and you’ll save yourself a lot of time by asking first.
How do you talk to us? There are several ways to get in touch:
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ocio-dev: This is a development focused mail list with a deep history of technical conversations and decisions that have shaped the project.
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ocio-user: This is an end-user oriented mail list, focused on how to use OCIO’s features within a host application. Common topics include crafting configs, DCC behavior, and general color questions.
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Slack: The OpenColorIO Slack group is where developers and expert users go to have real-time communication around OCIO. The group is invitation only, but just email us and we'll add anyone who is interested in participating in the discussion.
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GitHub Issues: GitHub issues are a great place to start a conversation! Issues aren’t restricted to bugs; we happily welcome feature requests and other suggestions submitted as issues. The only conversations we would direct away from issues are questions in the form of “How do I do X”. Please direct these to the ocio-dev or ocio-user mail lists, and consider contributing what you've learned to our docs if appropriate!
OpenColorIO is a project hosted by the Academy Software Foundation (ASWF) and follows the open source software best practice policies of the ASWF TAC with the guidance from the Linux Foundation.
OpenColorIO is licensed under the BSD-3-Clause license. Contributions to the library should abide by that license unless otherwised approved by the OCIO TSC and ASWF Governing Board.
Developers who wish to contribute code to be considered for inclusion in OpenColorIO (OCIO) must first complete a Contributor License Agreement (CLA).
OCIO uses EasyCLA for managing CLAs, which automatically checks to ensure CLAs are signed by a contributor before a commit can be merged.
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If you are an individual writing the code on your own time and you're SURE you are the sole owner of any intellectual property you contribute, you can sign the CLA as an individual contributor.
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If you are writing the code as part of your job, or if there is any possibility that your employers might think they own any intellectual property you create, then you should use the Corporate Contributor Licence Agreement.
The OCIO CLA's are the standard forms used by Linux Foundation projects and recommended by the ASWF TAC.
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” or "git commit -s"), indicating that the committer
wrote the code and has the right to release it under the
Modified-BSD-3-Clause
license.
Here is an example Signed-off-by line, which indicates that the submitter accepts the DCO:
Signed-off-by: John Doe <john.doe@example.com>
If John Doe has signed an individual CLA, or his corporation's CLA Manager has included his GitHub account in a corporate CLA approved list, his pull request can be merged. Otherwise the EasyCLA system will provide instructions on signing a CLA, or request inclusion in an existing corporate CLA approved list.
See the ASWF TAC CONTRIBUTING.md file for more information on this requirement.
All new source files should begin with a copyright and license stating:
// SPDX-License-Identifier: BSD-3-Clause
// Copyright Contributors to the OpenColorIO Project.
So you’ve broken the ice and chatted with us, and it turns out you’ve found a gnarly bug that you have a beautiful solution for. Wonderful!
From here on out we’ll be using 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. It can be a bit confusing at first, but feel free to reach out if you need assistance.
The first requirement for contributing is to have a GitHub account. This is needed in order to push changes to the upstream repository. After setting up your account you should then fork the OpenColorIO 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.
You will also need Git installed on your local development machine. If you need setup assistance, please see the official Git Documentation.
Once your Git environment is operational, the next step is to locally clone your forked OpenColorIO repository, and add a remote pointing to the upstream OpenColorIO repository. These topics are covered in Cloning a repository and Configuring a remote for a fork, but again, if you need assistance feel free to reach out on the ocio-dev mail list.
You are now ready to contribute.
The OpenColorIO repository has a relatively straight-forward structure, and a simple branching and merging strategy.
All development work is done directly on the main branch. This represents the bleeding-edge of the project and any contributions should be done on top of it.
After sufficient work is done on the main branch and OCIO leadership determines that a release is due, we will bump the relevant internal versioning and tag a commit with the corresponding version number, e.g. v2.0.1. 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.
Contributions should be submitted as Github pull requests. See Creating a pull request if you're unfamiliar with this concept.
Please review PROCESS.md for important procedures related to making changes to OpenColorIO. Small bug fixes and documentation changes can be more informal, but modifications to core OpenColorIO functionality MUST follow the Core Library Changes process.
The development cycle for a code change should follow this protocol:
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Create a topic branch in your local repository, following the naming format "feature/" or "bugfix/".
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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.
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Push commits to your fork.
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Create a Github pull request from your topic branch.
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All pull requests trigger CI builds on GitHub Actions. These builds verify that code compiles and all unit tests succeed. CI build status is displayed on the GitHub PR page, and changes will only be considered for merging after all builds have succeeded.
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Pull requests will be reviewed by project Committers and Contributors, who may discuss, offer constructive feedback, request changes, or approve the work.
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Upon receiving the required number of Committer approvals (as outlined in Required Approvals), a Committer other than the PR contributor may squash and merge changes into the main branch.
For a more detailed description of the contribution process, please see the Contributing Guide in the main OCIO documentation:
Please see the OpenColorIO Coding guidelines for a reference on project code style and best practices.
For standards on contributing to documentation, see the Documentation guidelines.
All functionality in OpenColorIO must be covered by an automated test. Tests
should be implemented in a separate but clearly associated source file under
the tests subdirectory (e.g. tests for src/OpenColorIO/Context.cpp are
located in tests/cpu/Context_tests.cpp). This test suite is collectively
expected to validate the behavior of every part of OCIO:
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Any new functionality should be accompanied by a test that validates its behavior.
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Any change to existing functionality should have tests added if they don't already exist.
The test should be run, via ctest, before submitting a pull request.
OpenColorIO labels each version with three numbers: Major.Minor.Patch, where:
- MAJOR indicates major architectural changes
- MINOR indicates an introduction of significant new features
- PATCH indicates ABI-compatible bug fixes and minor enhancements