# Contributing to Topola

*Anyone* can contribute to Topola, including you.

Contributions can be of any kind: documentation, organization,
tutorials, blog posts, bug reports, issues, feature requests, feature
implementations, pull requests, helping to manage issues, etc.. Many of
these tasks do not require specialized programming knowledge, or any
programming at all.

## Chat

You are encouraged to join our [Matrix
chatroom](https://matrix.to/#/%23topola:tchncs.de) or [IRC
channel](https://webchat.oftc.net/?channels=#topola) to talk with us
before you contribute. Both chatrooms are bridged, so it does not matter
which one you join.

## Reporting issues

If you believe you have found a defect in Topola or its documentation,
please report it on our [issue
tracker](https://codeberg.org/topola/topola/issues).

Under normal operation, crashes and panics are always considered
reportable bugs.

## Code contribution

We welcome code contributions from anyone regardless of skill or
experience level. We're friendly to newcomers. We will help you with
your contribution if there are any problems.

Topola accepts contributions using pull requests. For a step-by-step
guide on how to use these, refer to Codeberg's
[documentation](https://docs.codeberg.org/collaborating/pull-requests-and-git-flow/).

Before you submit a pull request, make sure Topola actually builds with
your changes. Follow the build instructions from the next section.

### Building

#### Prerequisites

Building Topola from source requires
[git](https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Getting-Started-Installing-Git) and
[cargo](https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/getting-started/installation.html)
to be installed on your system.

#### Obtaining the source

Clone the [repository](https://codeberg.org/topola/topola):

    git clone https://codeberg.org/topola/topola.git

#### Preparing to build

Change your working directory to your clone of Topola's repository:

    cd topola

Topola currently requires nightly Rust to build. Enable it with

    rustup override set nightly

#### Egui port

Build the project with

    cargo build --features egui --bin topola-egui	

Finally, run Topola by executing

    cargo run --features egui --bin topola-egui

##### Running Topola in a Web browser

Topola can be built to run in a Web browser using
[Trunk](https://trunkrs.dev/), which will be installed with the
following command:

    cargo binstall trunk

To build and open Topola in your browser, run

    trunk serve

#### SDL2 demo

Optionally, for shorter build times you may build the SDL2 demo instead
of the Egui port:

    cargo build --features sdl2 --bin topola-sdl2-demo	
    cargo run --features sdl2 --bin topola-sdl2-demo

The downside is that the SDL2 demo's user interface is highly incomplete.