% Want to contribute?

Every free/open source software project is run in a different way. To set the
right expectations and prevent disappointment and/or wasted effort, here's a
few notes on how I deal with contributions.

**Feedback** of any kind is always welcome, but I make no promise that I will
act on it. Feel free to open an issue on [my Gitea
instance](https://code.blicky.net/yorhel) or mail me at
[projects@yorhel.nl](mailto:projects@yorhel.nl).

I love **bug reports**, so don't hesitate to report anything that doesn't work
or doesn't work as you had expected.  Whether I will actually fix it depends on
the nature of the bug, of course, but I do very much value stable and reliable
software.

**Feature requests** are welcome, but I tend to not act on most of them and may
sometimes outright reject a feature if it seems out of scope. It's still good
to have a list of potential features to work on if I feel like making myself
useful, so new ideas are nonetheless appreciated.

Feel free to send **patches** and **pull requests** for trivial fixes for
simple bugs, documentation issues, typos, etc. If the change is trivial to
review and improves the software in a noticeable way, I'm happy to apply it.
Don't bother submitting patches for things that don't noticeably improve the
software. I don't give a damn about compiler warnings when they don't affect
the correctness of the code. Slight inconsistencies in code style or typos in
variable names or comments (i.e. non-user visible parts) don't really need
fixing, either.

When it comes to patches or pull requests for larger fixes or new features, I
strongly advise you to get in touch first to discuss your planned changes.
After all, there's a good chance I already have opinions about it. Generally
speaking, I have no intention to merge code that I haven't thoroughly reviewed,
and I enjoy programming much more than I enjoy reviewing other people's code,
so just throwing patches over the fence and expecting me to merge anything is a
recipe for disappointment.

If you use my software in combination with **proprietary software** or a
proprietary OS (MacOS, Windows), then you're mostly on your own. I write free
software because I care about user freedom, so I'm not inclined to spend time
and effort improving my code to better work with software that I don't plan to
ever use. I may accept the occasional fix if it's simple enough, but I've no
intention to bend over backwards.
