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After you've reviewed these contribution guidelines, you'll be all set to contribute to this project.

Contributing to steam-runtime-tools

(TODO: more general information here)

Doing test-builds

For quick tests during development, you can build on any reasonably modern Linux distribution. Ubuntu 18.04 and Debian 10 are examples of suitable versions.

To check that everything works in the older Steam Runtime 1 'scout' environment, either use Gitlab-CI, or do a meson dist on a modern distribution and use that to build a package in the SteamRT environment. The Gitlab-CI does the meson dist in the build step, and builds the package on SteamRT in the autopkgtest step.

You might find deb-build-snapshot useful for this. smcv uses this configuration for test-builds:

LC_ALL=C.UTF-8 \
deb-build-snapshot \
--upstream \
--source \
--download ~/tmp/build-area \
--deb-schroot steamrt_scout_amd64 \
--install-all \
build-vm

where build-vm is a virtual machine with steam-runtime-tools' dependencies and a steamrt_scout_amd64 chroot, that can be accessed via ssh build-vm. If the dependencies and chroot are available on your development system, use localhost, which will make deb-build-snapshot do the build locally instead of using ssh.

Design notes

  • ABIs/architectures are identified by their Debian-style multiarch tuple, which is a GNU tuple (x86_64-linux-gnu, arm-linux-gnueabi) with its CPU part normalized to the oldest/most compatible in a CPU family (so i386, not i686, and arm, not armv5tel). Helper subprocesses are prefixed with the multiarch tuple, in the same style used for cross-compilers and cross-tools (x86_64-linux-gnu-inspect-library, i386-linux-gnu-wflinfo).

  • Be careful when adding dependencies to the main library. GLib 2.32 (Ubuntu 12.04 'precise', SteamRT 1 'scout') can be relied on. JSON-GLib is OK (we have a backport in SteamRT 1 'scout'). Anything else is probably bad news.

    • In particular, try not to pull in C++ ABIs, because incompatible C++ ABIs are one of the things that steam-runtime-tools should be able to detect and diagnose. We use C ABIs because they are the lowest common denominator for compatibility between distros.
  • Any checks that can reasonably crash should be in a subprocess. This means that if they crash, they don't bring down the entire Steam client with them.

  • Any checks that need to look at more than one ABI (32- and 64-bit) must be in a subprocess, so that the same process can run both.

  • The inspect-library helper should not have non-libc dependencies - not even GLib. Other helpers may have library dependencies if it is useful to do so.

  • For system information and checks, new functionality should be accessed through SrtSystemInfo so that its cache lifetime can be managed. Separate access points like srt_check_library_presence() will be kept until the next ABI break, but don't add new ones.

Automated tests

New code should have test coverage where feasible. It's OK to have some "design for test" in the APIs to facilitate this, such as srt_system_info_set_environ().

If a helper can't be unit-tested (for example because it needs working OpenGL), we'll understand. The code that calls into the helper should still be unit-tested, by using a mock implementation of the helper.

Most automated tests run in two phases:

  • Build-time tests (meson test, ninja test, dh_auto_test): steam-runtime-tools has just been built, and probably isn't installed. The environment variables in tests/meson.build are set. The code under test should look for data, helper subprocesses, etc. relative to those environment variables. We can add more environment variables like GI_TYPELIB_PATH if they become necessary.

  • Installed-tests (autopkgtest, debian/tests): steam-runtime-tools has been built and installed system-wide. The code under test should look for data, helper subprocesses, etc. in their real installed locations. For things that get installed next to the tests, such as mock implementations of helpers and mock ABI data, it should look in the directory containing the executable.

Release procedure

  • The version number is EPOCH.YYYYMMDD.MICRO where:

    • EPOCH increases on major (incompatible) changes, or if you change the version-numbering scheme
    • YYYYMMDD is today's date if you are doing a feature release, or the date of the version you are branching from if you are applying "stable branch" hotfixes to an older version
    • MICRO starts at 0, and increases if you need to apply "stable branch" hotfixes to an old version (or if you need to do two feature releases on the same day)
  • Look at the Debian package's build log from deb-build-snapshot or Gitlab-CI. If new library ABI has been added, you will see warnings like these:

    dpkg-gensymbols: warning: debian/libsteam-runtime-tools-0-0/DEBIAN/symbols doesn't match completely debian/libsteam-runtime-tools-0-0.symbols
    --- debian/libsteam-runtime-tools-0-0.symbols (libsteam-runtime-tools-0-0_0.20190806.0+14+g7bda756-0~snapshot_amd64)
    +++ dpkg-gensymbolsWIRbYG	2019-08-16 10:34:42.915782703 +0000
    @@ -13,9 +13,20 @@
      srt_library_get_type@Base 0.20190801.0
      srt_library_issues_get_type@Base 0.20190801.0
      srt_library_symbols_format_get_type@Base 0.20190801.0
    + srt_runtime_issues_get_type@Base 0.20190806.0+14+g7bda756-0~snapshot
    + srt_steam_issues_get_type@Base 0.20190806.0+14+g7bda756-0~snapshot
      srt_system_info_can_run@Base 0.20190801.0

    Update debian/libsteam-runtime-tools-0-0.symbols, adding the symbols that you have added with the version number that you plan to release, for example srt_runtime_issues_get_type@Base 0.20190816.0.

  • Update debian/changelog: gbp dch, edit to clarify the changelog if desired, dch -r, set the version number.

  • Update the version number and ABI minor/micro version in meson.build.

  • Commit everything.

  • Add an annotated git tag vVERSION.

  • Do a final release build, for example with:

    deb-build-snapshot -d ~/tmp/build-area --source-only --release localhost
  • Upload the resulting .changes file to your OBS branch to be built. If it succeeds, submit it to the main OBS project to be included in the next scout release. If it fails, fix it and prepare a new release (with the next micro version number).