Thank you for your interest in contributing to ICC Software. This document explains our contribution process and procedures, so please review it first:
Contributors are anyone who submits content to the project, Committers review and approve such submissions, and the ICC provides general project oversight.
The first thing to do, before anything else, is to talk to us! Whether you are 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 question may have been solved or discussed already, and you will save yourself a lot of time by asking first.
How do you talk to us? There are several ways to get in touch:
- 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”. Those questions should be discussed on the ICC Members Mailing List.
All official software projects hosted by the International Color Consoritum (ICC) follows the open source software best practice policies. The International Color Consoritum IP policy governs ICC specification development and contributions to ICC open source software. Software contributions are also covered by the Contributor License Agreement (CLA).
Developers who wish to contribute code to be considered for inclusion in ICC software must first complete a Contributor License Agreement (CLA).
There is no cost or membership requirement to sign the ICC Contributor License Agreement (CLA). Please note that this is different from membership in the International Color Consortium (ICC). If your organization relies on our projects, please become a member. Membership dues are an essential source of funding and investment for these projects.
-
If you are an individual writing the code on your own time and you are SURE you are the sole owner of any intellectual property you contribute, you can sign the CLA as an individual contributor.
-
If you are writing the code as part of your job, or if there is any possibility that your employer might think they own any intellectual property you create, then you should use the Corporate Contributor Licence Agreement
ICC software is licensed under the BSD 3-Clause “New” or “Revised” License. Contributions to ICC software projects should abide by that license unless otherwised specified or approved by the ICC.
All new source files must begin with the ICC Copyright notice and include or reference the BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" License.
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.
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 the ICC software project 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 ICC project repository, and add a remote pointing to the upstream ICC project repository. These topics are covered in Cloning a repository and Configuring a remote for a fork.
You are now ready to contribute.
Contributions should be submitted as Github pull requests. See Creating a pull request if you're unfamiliar with this concept.
Small bug fixes and documentation changes can be more informal, but modifications to core functionality MUST follow process outlined below.
The development cycle for a code change should follow this protocol:
-
Create a topic branch in your local repository, following the naming format "feature/" or "bugfix/".
-
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.
-
Push commits to your fork.
-
Create a Github pull request from your topic branch.
-
Pull requests will be reviewed by project Committers and Contributors, who may discuss, offer constructive feedback, request changes, or approve the work.
-
Upon receiving the required number of Committer approvals, a Committer other than the PR contributor may squash and merge changes into the main branch.
ICC projects 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