fractal/CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing

Newcomers

Fractal follows the GNOME Newcomers workflow. Follow these pages to learn how to contribute.

Here are also a few links to help you get started with Rust and the GTK Rust bindings:

• Learn Rust
• GUI development with Rust and GTK 4
• gtk-rs website

The Rust docs of our application might also be useful.

Don't hesitate to join our Matrix room to come talk to us and ask us any questions you might have.

Build Instructions

Prerequisites

Fractal is written in Rust, so you will need to have at least Rust 1.60 and Cargo available on your system. You will also need to install the Rust nightly toolchain to be able to run our pre-commit hook.

If you're building Fractal with Flatpak (via GNOME Builder or the command line), you will need to manually add the necessary remotes and install the required FreeDesktop extensions:

# Add Flathub-beta and the gnome-nightly repo
flatpak remote-add --user --if-not-exists flathub-beta https://flathub.org/beta-repo/flathub-beta.flatpakrepo
flatpak remote-add --user --if-not-exists gnome-nightly https://nightly.gnome.org/gnome-nightly.flatpakrepo

# Install the gnome-nightly Sdk and Platform runtime
flatpak install --user gnome-nightly org.gnome.Sdk//master org.gnome.Platform//master

# Install the required rust-stable extension from Flathub-beta
flatpak install --user flathub-beta org.freedesktop.Sdk.Extension.rust-stable//22.08beta

# Install the required llvm extension from Flathub-beta
flatpak install --user flathub-beta org.freedesktop.Sdk.Extension.llvm14//22.08beta

GNOME Builder

Using GNOME Builder with flatpak is the recommended way of building and installing Fractal.

By default, GNOME Builder should select the org.gnome.Fractal.Devel.json manifest, which is the manifest used for building the nightly version. It is recommended to switch to the org.gnome.Fractal.Hack.json manifest which will build much faster.

Flatpak via fenv

As an alternative, fenv allows to setup a flatpak environment from the command line and execute commands in that environment.

First, install fenv:

# Clone the project somewhere on your system
git clone https://gitlab.gnome.org/ZanderBrown/fenv.git

# Move into the folder
cd fenv

# Install fenv with Cargo
cargo install --path .

You can now discard the fenv directory if you want.

After that, move into the directory where you cloned Fractal and setup the project:

# Setup the flatpak environment
fenv gen build-aux/org.gnome.Fractal.Hack.json

# Initialize the build system
fenv exec -- meson --prefix=/app _build

Finally, build and run the application:

# Build the project
fenv exec -- ninja -C _build

# Install the application in the flatpak environment
fenv exec -- ninja -C _build install

# Launch Fractal
fenv exec ./_build/src/fractal

To test changes you make to the code, re-run these three last commands.

Install the flatpak

Some features that interact with the system require the app to be installed to test them (i.e. notifications, command line arguments, etc.).

Move inside the build-aux folder and then build and install the app:

cd build-aux
flatpak-builder --user --install app org.gnome.Fractal.Hack.json

It can then be entirely removed from your system with:

flatpak remove --delete-data org.gnome.Fractal.Hack

GNU/Linux

If you decide to ignore our recommendation and build on your host system, outside of Flatpak, you will need Meson and Ninja.

meson . _build --prefix=/usr/local
ninja -C _build
sudo ninja -C _build install

Pre-commit

We expect all code contributions to be correctly formatted. To help with that, a pre-commit hook should get installed as part of the building process. It runs the scripts/checks.sh script. It's a quick script that makes sure that the code is correctly formatted with rustfmt, among other things. Make sure that this script is effectively run before submitting your merge request, otherwise CI will probably fail right away.

You should also run cargo clippy as that will catch common errors and improve the quality of your submissions and is once again checked by our CI.

Commit

Please follow the GNOME commit message guidelines.

Merge Request

Before submitting a merge request, make sure that your fork is available publicly, otherwise CI won't be able to run.

Use the title of your commit as the title of your MR if there's only one. Otherwise it should summarize all your commits. If your commits do several tasks that can be separated, open several merge requests.

In the details, write a more detailed description of what it does. If your changes include a change in the UI or the UX, provide screenshots in both light and dark mode, and/or a screencast of the new behavior.

Don't forget to mention the issue that this merge request solves or is related to, if applicable. GitLab recognizes the syntax Closes #XXXX or Fixes #XXXX that will close the corresponding issue accordingly when your change is merged.

We expect to always work with a clean commit history. When you apply fixes or suggestions, amend or fixup and squash your previous commits that you can then force push.