内容简介:There’s a common pattern among free- and open-source software projects to include a “contrib” directory at the top of their source code tree. I’ve seen this in many projects for many years, but I’ve seen it discussed only rarely — so here we are!The contri
There’s a common pattern among free- and open-source software projects to include a “contrib” directory at the top of their source code tree. I’ve seen this in many projects for many years, but I’ve seen it discussed only rarely — so here we are!
The contrib directory is used as an unorganized (or, at best, lightly organized) bin of various useful things contrib uted by the community around the software, but which is not necessarily a good candidate for being a proper part of the software. Things in contrib should not be wired into your build system, shouldn’t be part of your automated testing, shouldn’t be included in your documentation, and should not be installed with your packages. contrib entries are not supported by the maintainers, and are given only a light code review at the most. There is no guarantee whatsoever of workitude or maintenance for anything found in contrib.
Nevertheless, it is often useful to have such a place to put various little scripts, config files, and so on, which provide a helpful leg-up for users hoping to integrate the software with some third-party product, configure it to fit nicely into an unusual environment, coax it into some unusual behavior, or whatever else the case may be. The idea is to provide a place to drop a couple of files which might save a future someone facing similar problems from doing all of the work themselves. Such people can contribute back small fixes or improvements, and the maintenance burden of such contributions lies entirely with the users.
If the contributor wants to take on a greater maintenance burden, this kind of stuff is better suited to a standalone project, with its own issue tracking, releases, and so on. If you just wrote a little script and want somewhere to drop it so that others may find it useful, then contrib is the place for you.
For a quick example, let’s consult Sway’s contrib folder :
_incr_version autoname-workspaces.py grimshot grimshot.1 grimshot.1.scd inactive-windows-transparency.py
The _incr_version
script is something that I use myself to help with preparing
new releases. It is a tool useful only to maintainers, and therefore is not
distributed with the project.
Looking at autoname-workspaces.py
next, from which we can see that the quality
criteria is reduced for members of contrib — none of Sway’s upstream code
is written in Python, and the introduction of such a dependency would be
controversial. This script automatically changes your workspace name based on
what applications you’re running in it — an interesting workflow, but
quite different from the OOTB
experience.
grimshot
is a shell script which ties together many third-party programs
(grim, slurp, wl-copy, jq, and notify-send) to make a convenient way of taking
screenshots. Adding this upstream would introduce a lot
of third-party
dependencies for a minor convenience. This tool has had a bit more effort put
into it: notice that a man page is provided as well. Because the contrib
directory does not participate in the upstream build system, the contributor has
also added a pre-compiled man page so that you can skip this step when
installing it on your system.
Last, we have inactive-windows-transparency.py
, which is a script for making
all windows other than your focused one semi-transparent. Some people may want
this, but again, it’s not really something we’d consider appropriate for the
OOTB experience. Perfect for contrib!
Have a comment on one of my posts? Start a discussion in my public inbox by sending an email to ~sircmpwn/public-inbox@lists.sr.ht [ mailing list etiquette ]
Are you a free software maintainer who is struggling with stress, demanding users, overwork, or any other social problems in the course of your work? Please email me — I know how you feel, and I can lend a sympathetic ear and share some veteran advice.
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
A simple way to get more value from tracing
A lot of people seem to think that distributed tracing isn't useful, or at least not without extreme effort that isn't worth it for companies smaller than FB. For example, here are a couple of public conversations that sound like a number of priva…
via Dan Luu May 31, 2020Achieving accessibility through simplicity
I have received many emails complimenting SourceHut’s simple design and lightweight pages1, but I have received a surprising amount of positive feedback from a particular group of users: the blind community. For many software teams, especially web developers…
via Blogs on Sourcehut May 27, 2020This month I’ve started working with Valve, the company behind the Steam game platform. I’ll be helping them improving gamescope, their gaming Wayland compositor. Unlike existing compositors, gamescope uses Vulkan and libliftoff. Because these are pretty …
via emersion May 18, 2020Generated by openring
以上就是本文的全部内容,希望本文的内容对大家的学习或者工作能带来一定的帮助,也希望大家多多支持 码农网
猜你喜欢:本站部分资源来源于网络,本站转载出于传递更多信息之目的,版权归原作者或者来源机构所有,如转载稿涉及版权问题,请联系我们。
Mastering JavaServer Faces
Bill Dudney、Jonathan Lehr、Bill Willis、LeRoy Mattingly / Wiley / 2004-6-7 / USD 40.00
Harness the power of JavaServer Faces to create your own server-side user interfaces for the Web This innovative book arms you with the tools to utilize JavaServer Faces (JSF), a new standard that wi......一起来看看 《Mastering JavaServer Faces》 这本书的介绍吧!