Pixman is a library that provides low-level pixel manipulation features such as image compositing and trapezoid rasterization.

Questions, bug reports and patches should be directed to the pixman mailing list:

    http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/pixman

You can also file bugs at

    https://bugs.freedesktop.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=pixman

For real time discussions about pixman, feel free to join the IRC channels #cairo and #xorg-devel on the FreeNode IRC network.

Contributing

In order to contribute to pixman, you will need a working knowledge of the git version control system. For a quick getting started guide, there is the "Everyday Git With 20 Commands Or So guide"

    http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/everyday.html

from the Git homepage. For more in depth git documentation, see the resources on the Git community documentation page:

    http://git-scm.com/documentation

Pixman uses the infrastructure from the freedesktop.org umbrella project. For instructions about how to use the git service on freedesktop.org, see:

    http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Infrastructure/git/Developers

The Pixman master repository can be found at:

git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/pixman

and browsed on the web here:

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/pixman/

Sending patches

The general workflow for sending patches is to first make sure that git can send mail on your system. Then,

• create a branch off of master in your local git repository

• make your changes as one or more commits

• use the

   git send-email
  

  command to send the patch series to pixman@lists.freedesktop.org.

In order for your patches to be accepted, please consider the following guidelines:

• This link:

   http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/user-manual.html#patch-series
  

  describes how what a good patch series is, and to create one with git.

• At each point in the series, pixman should compile and the test suite should pass.

  The exception here is if you are changing the test suite to demonstrate a bug. In this case, make one commit that makes the test suite fail due to the bug, and then another commit that fixes the bug.

  You can run the test suite with

   make check
  

  It will take around two minutes to run on a modern PC.

• Follow the coding style described in the CODING_STYLE file

• For bug fixes, include an update to the test suite to make sure the bug doesn't reappear.

• For new features, add tests of the feature to the test suite. Also, add a program demonstrating the new feature to the demos/ directory.

• Write descriptive commit messages. Useful information to include: - Benchmark results, before and after

  • Description of the bug that was fixed
  • Detailed rationale for any new API
  • Alternative approaches that were rejected (and why they don't work)
  • If review comments were incorporated, a brief version history describing what those changes were.

• For big patch series, send an introductory email with an overall description of the patch series, including benchmarks and motivation. Each commit message should still be descriptive and include enough information to understand why this particular commit was necessary.

Pixman has high standards for code quality and so almost everybody should expect to have the first versions of their patches rejected.

If you think that the reviewers are wrong about something, or that the guidelines above are wrong, feel free to discuss the issue on the list. The purpose of the guidelines and code review is to ensure high code quality; it is not an exercise in compliance.