Contributing — GNUnet documentation

# Contributing

## Licenses of contributions

GNUnet is a GNU package. All code contributions must thus be put under the GNU Affero Public License (AGPL). All documentation should be put under FSF approved licenses (see fdl).

By submitting documentation, translations, and other content to GNUnet you automatically grant the right to publish code under the GNU Public License and documentation under either or both the GNU Public License or the GNU Free Documentation License. When contributing to the GNUnet project, GNU standards and the GNU philosophy should be adhered to.

## Copyright Assignment

We require a formal copyright assignment for GNUnet contributors to GNUnet e.V.; nevertheless, we do allow pseudonymous contributions. By signing the copyright agreement and submitting your code (or documentation) to us, you agree to share the rights to your code with GNUnet e.V.; GNUnet e.V. receives non-exclusive ownership rights, and in particular is allowed to dual-license the code. You retain non-exclusive rights to your contributions, so you can also share your contributions freely with other projects.

GNUnet e.V. will publish all accepted contributions under the AGPLv3 or any later version. The association may decide to publish contributions under additional licenses (dual-licensing).

We do not intentionally remove your name from your contributions; however, due to extensive editing it is not always trivial to attribute contributors properly. If you find that you significantly contributed to a file (or the project as a whole) and are not listed in the respective authors file or section, please do let us know.

Download Copyright Assignment here.

## Contributing to the Reference Manual

Todo

Move section to contrib.rst?

Todo

Update contrib section to reflect move to reStructuredText

- When writing documentation, please use gender-neutral wording when referring to people, such as singular “they”, “their”, “them”, and so forth.

- Keep line length below 74 characters, except for URLs. URLs break in the PDF output when they contain linebreaks.

- Do not use tab characters (see chapter 2.1 texinfo manual)

- Write texts in the third person perspective.

## Contributing testcases

In the core of GNUnet, we restrict new testcases to a small subset of languages, in order of preference:

1. C

2. Portable Shell Scripts

3. Python (3.7 or later)

We welcome efforts to remove our existing Python 2.7 scripts to replace them either with portable shell scripts or, at your choice, Python 3.7 or later.

If you contribute new python based testcases, we advise you to not repeat our past misfortunes and write the tests in a standard test framework like for example pytest.

For writing portable shell scripts, these tools are useful:

- Shellcheck, for static

    analysis of shell scripts.

- http://www.etalabs.net/sh_tricks.html,

- `bash`-`dash` (`/bin/sh` on Debian) interoperability

    - checkbashisms,

    - https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DashAsBinSh, and

    - https://mywiki.wooledge.org/Bashism