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termux-packages/CONTRIBUTING.md

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Contributing

Termux is an open source application and it is built on users' contributions. However, most of work is done by Termux maintainers on their spare time and therefore only priority tasks are being completed.

Here are ways how you can help:

Developer's wiki is available at https://github.com/termux/termux-packages/wiki.

Fixing issues

Contribute to Termux by submitting new packages or fixing bugs. Pay attention to issues labeled as "bug report" and "help wanted".

Note that issue solving may not be easy. If you decided to contribute to @termux, ensure that you read the developer's wiki and you are ready to deal with errors on your own.

Pull requests containing incomplete work are not being merged.

A note about package requests

We are rejecting package requests for single-file scripts and low-quality, infamous and outdated, dead projects. We may also reject in packaging non-original, forked projects.

Additionally we require that requested packages met these conditions:

  • Package should have widely recognised OSS licenses like GNU GPL, MIT, Apache-2.0 and similar.
  • Package should NOT be an outdated, dead project.
  • Package should NOT be a part of language-specific ecosystem. Such packages are installable through pip, gem, cpan, npm.

Please be ready that your package request will not be processed immediately.

Hosting a mirror

Consider hosting own Termux repository mirror to help to distribute bandwidth usage between different servers. That will reduce chance of hitting the traffic quota on our Bintray account.

When your mirror is ready, open the issue so we can include it into our mirror list.

Server requirements

Since Bintray does not provide Rsync access to package repositories, you will need to mirror it over HTTP. We recommend to use apt-mirror for that.

Here are the server requirements:

  • 20 GB of disk free space.
  • Stable network with 3+ TB of monthly bandwidth.
  • Cron job for updating mirror at least once in 3 days.

It also preferrable that your server uses a caching CDN.

Here are the URLs for mirroring:

https://dl.bintray.com/termux/termux-packages-24
https://dl.bintray.com/grimler/game-packages-24
https://dl.bintray.com/grimler/science-packages-24
https://dl.bintray.com/grimler/termux-root-packages-24
https://dl.bintray.com/xeffyr/unstable-packages
https://dl.bintray.com/xeffyr/x11-packages

If you want to include your mirror into our mirror list, ensure that monthly server's uptime is 80% or higher.

Updating packages

Keeping packages up-to-date ensures that Termux users' will not experience the upstream bugs or security issues and will be able to use the latest features.

Periodically check the Repology page to see what is outdated and submit a pull request with version update.

How to update package

asciicast

Most packages can be updated by just modifying variables TERMUX_PKG_VERSION and TERMUX_PKG_SHA256.

  • TERMUX_PKG_VERSION: a text field containing an original version of package.
  • TERMUX_PKG_SHA256: a text field or an array of text fields containing SHA-256 checksum for each source code bundle defined by TERMUX_PKG_SRCURL.

More about build.sh variables you can read on developer's wiki.

Rebuilding package with no version change

Changes to patch files and build configuration options require submission of a new package release with a different version string. As we can't modify the original package version, we append a number called revision. This number should be incremented on each submitted build whenever project's version remains to be same.

Revision is specified through TERMUX_PKG_REVISION build.sh variable. To have build.sh script easily readable, we require revision variable to be placed on the next line after TERMUX_PKG_VERSION.

TERMUX_PKG_VERSION=1.0
TERMUX_PKG_REVISION=4

Downgrading a package or changing versioning scheme

Sometimes we need to downgrade a package or in any other way to change format of version string but we also need to tell package manager that this is a new package version which should be installed with apt upgrade. To force new build to be a package update, we set a package epoch.

We don't have separate build.sh variable for specifying epoch, so we doing that through TERMUX_PKG_VERSION variable. It takes following format:

${EPOCH}:${ORIG_VERSION}

Epoch should be bumped on each change of versioning scheme or downgrade.

TERMUX_PKG_VERSION=1:0.5
TERMUX_PKG_REVISION=4

Note that if you are not @termux collaborator, pull request must contain a description why you are submitting a package downgrade. All pull requests which submit package downgrading without any serious reason will be denied.

Dealing with patch errors

Major changes introduced to packages often make current patches incompatible with newer package version. Unfortunately, there no universal guide about fixing patch issues as workaround is always based on changes introduced to the new source code version.

Here are few things you may to try:

  1. If patch fixing particular known upstream issue, check the project's VCS for commits fixing the issue. There is a chance that patch is no longer needed.

  2. Inspecting the failed patch file and manually applying changes to source code. Do so only if you understand the source code and changes introduced by patch.

    Regenerate patch file, e.g. with:

    diff -uNr package-1.0 package-1.0.mod > previously-failed-patch-file.patch

Always check the CI (Github Actions) status for your pull request. If it fails, then either fix or close it. Maintainers can fix it on their own, if issues are minor. But they won't rewrite whole your submission.