# Contributor's Guide

Ghidra is an open source project. If you are interested in making it better,
there are many ways you can contribute. For example, you can:

- Submit a bug report
- Suggest a new feature
- Provide feedback by commenting on feature requests/proposals
- Propose a patch by submitting a pull request
- Suggest or submit documentation improvements
- Review outstanding pull requests
- Answer questions from other users
- Share the software with other users who are interested
- Teach others to use the software
- Package and distribute the software in a downstream community (such as your
  preferred Linux distribution)

## Bugs and Feature Requests

If you believe that you have found a bug or wish to propose a new feature,
please first search the existing [issues] to see if it has already been
reported. If you are unable to find an existing issue, consider using one of
the provided templates to create a new issue and provide as many details as you
can to assist in reproducing the bug or explaining your proposed feature.

## Patch Submission Tips

Patches should be submitted in the form of Pull Requests to the Ghidra
[repository] on GitHub. But first, consider the following tips to ensure a
smooth process when submitting a patch:

- Ensure that the patch compiles and runs in at least our development environment, and ideally our
  full build too. Even the most trivial change done in the GitHub editor has a chance to cause
  problems in the full development environment for unexpected reasons.
- If using "AI" to assist in development, please apply extra scrutiny to its suggestions, in terms
  of both correctness and adherence to our [legal](#legal) requirements.
- Be understanding, patient, and friendly; developers may need time to review your submissions 
  before they can take action or respond. This does not mean your contribution is not valued. If 
  your contribution has not received a response in a reasonable time, consider commenting with a 
  polite inquiry for an update.
- Limit your patches to the smallest reasonable change to achieve your intended goal. For example, 
  do not make unnecessary indentation changes; but don't go out of your way to make the patch so 
  minimal that it isn't easy to read, either. Consider the reviewer's perspective.
- Unless previously authorized by the Ghidra team, repackaging, renaming, and other refactoring 
  should not be part of any pull request. These types of changes are difficult to review, pollute 
  the git history making it harder to do git forensics on regressions, and will likely conflict with
  other changes that the Ghidra team is making internally.
- Avoid "find and replace" changes in your pull request. While it may be  tempting to globally 
  replace calls to deprecated methods or change the style of the code to fit your personal 
  preference, these types of seemingly trivial changes have likely not already been performed by the
  Ghidra team for good reason.
- Focus your patches on bug fixes that were discovered through real-world usage and testing, and on
  improvements that clearly satisfy a need in Ghidra's functionality. Before you begin 
  implementing, consider first opening a dialogue with the Ghidra team to ensure that your efforts
  will align with the goals of the project. This will significantly improve the odds that your 
  patch gets accepted.
- Unless it addresses a critical security update, avoid pull requests that update jars or other 3rd
  party libraries. It is preferred that these changes are made internally by the team. If you have
  a need for an updated library, please submit an issue with your request instead of a pull request.
- Before submission, please squash your commits using a message that starts with the issue number
  and a description of the changes.
- Isolate multiple patches from each other. If you wish to make several independent patches, do so 
  in separate, smaller pull requests that can be reviewed more easily.
- Avoid submitting self-generated binary files as part of your pull request. Despite your best 
  intentions, our policy forbids accepting them because we cannot effectively review and validate 
  their content.
- Be prepared to answer questions from reviewers. They may have further questions before accepting
  your patch, and may even propose changes. Please accept this feedback constructively, and not as a
  rejection of your proposed change.

## Review

- We welcome code reviews from anyone. A committer is required to formally accept and merge the 
  changes.
- Reviewers will be looking for things like threading issues, performance implications, API design,
  duplication of existing functionality, readability and code style, avoidance of bloat 
  (scope-creep), etc.
- Reviewers will likely ask questions to better understand your change.
- Reviewers will make comments about changes to your patch:
    - MUST means that the change is required
    - SHOULD means that the change is suggested, further discussion on the subject may be required
    - COULD means that the change is optional

## Getting Started

Once available, please see the [Developer's Guide][devguide] for instructions to set up a suitable 
development environment.

## Timeline and Managing Expectations

As we continue to engage contributors and learn best practices for running a successful open source 
project, our processes and guidance will likely evolve. We will try to communicate expectations as 
we are able to and be responsive. We hope that the community will share their suggestions for
improving this engagement. Based on the level of initial interest we receive and the availability 
of resources to evaluate contributions, we anticipate the following:

- We will initially prioritize pull requests that include small bug fixes and code that addresses 
  potential vulnerabilities as well as pull requests that include improvements for processor 
  language specifications because these require a reasonable amount of effort to evaluate and will
  help us exercise and revise our process for accepting contributions. In other words, we are going
  to start small in order to work out the kinks first.
- We are committed to maintaining the integrity and security of our code base. In addition to the
  careful review the maintainers will give to code contributions to make sure they do not introduce
  new bugs or vulnerabilities, we will be trying to identify best practices to incorporate with our
  open source project so that contributors can have more control over whether their contributions 
  are accepted. These might include things like style guides and requirements for tests and 
  documentation to accompany some code contributions. As a result, it may take a long time for some
  contributions to be accepted. This does not mean we are ignoring them.
- We are committed to integrating this GitHub project with our team's regular development work flow
  so that the open source project remains dynamic and relevant. This may  affect our responsiveness
  and ability to accept pull requests quickly. This does not mean we are ignoring them.
- Not all innovative ideas need to be accepted as pull requests into this GitHub project to be 
  valuable to the community. There may be times when we recommend that you just share your code for
  some enhancement to Ghidra from your own repository. As we identify and recognize extensions that
  are of general interest to the reverse engineering community, we may seek to incorporate them with
  our baseline.

## Legal

Consistent with Section D.6. of the GitHub Terms of Service as of 2019, and Section 5. of the Apache
License, Version 2.0, the project maintainer for this project accepts contributions using the 
inbound=outbound model. When you submit a pull request to this repository (inbound), you are 
agreeing to license your contribution under the same terms as specified in [LICENSE] (outbound).

This is an open source project. Contributions you make to this public U.S. Government ("USG") 
repository are completely voluntary. When you submit an issue, bug report, question, enhancement, 
pull request, etc., you are offering your contribution without expectation of payment, you expressly
waive any future pay claims against the USG related to your contribution, and you acknowledge that
this does not create an obligation on the part of the USG of any kind. Furthermore, your 
contributing to this project does not create an employer-employee relationship between the United 
States ("U.S.") Government and the contributor.

[issues]: https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra/issues
[repository]: https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra/
[devguide]: DevGuide.md
[LICENSE]: LICENSE
