HGKeeper

---

title: Contributing

date: 2017-09-19T02:00:55.000Z

anchor: contributing

weight: 10

original: true

lastmod: 2019-08-21T04:05:48.000Z

aliases:

- /development/contributing/mercurial/

- /development/version-control/

---

## Ideas to contribute

Pidgin is a huge project with a ton of things to be done, even if you're not a

coder. Below is a short list of things you can do to help get involved!!

* Triage the issue tracker.

* Try to reproduce described bugs. If you can find an easy way to

reproduce, leave a comment explaining how to do it.

* Find/mark/close duplicates. Seriously, even just one or two duplicates

found and properly marked is a huge help to our backlog!

* Suggest patches be turned into pull requests, or bring patches to the

attention of the core dev team.

* Help users and participate in the community

[chatrooms]({{< ref "contact#chatrooms" >}}).

* Proofread the documentation--this is a really, really easy way to start!

* Help facilitate translators and translations

* via [transifex](https://www.transifex.com/pidgin/pidgin/)

* help translate [this repo](https://keep.imfreedom.org/pidgin/nest)

* Convert [legacy wiki](https://old.pidgin.im) pages to markdown for inclusion

in [this repo](https://keep.imfreedom.org/pidgin/nest).

* Walk the links on [ThirdPartyPlugins](https://pidgin.im/plugins)

and mark broken ones as such. This is another really easy way to start!

* Participate in discussion on IRC, XMPP, and/or the Mailing Lists.

For the coders out there:

* Find/fix build warnings.

* Find/fix bugs on your own or via the issue tracker.

* Participate in design discussions.

* Add cool features!

* Look over the outstanding review requests on our [Review

Board](https://reviews.imfreedom.org/) instance. You don't have to actually

review code (but if you can provide helpful feedback we will appreciate it!),

but looking through the open review requests can help you find your way into

our codebase and style.

## How to submit a bug report

Submitting *good* bug reports is very important.

### Before you submit any bug report

Remember that **we don't support third-party plugins** like the ones we showcase

in the [plugins]({{< ref "plugins" >}}) section of this site. We didn't develop

those plugins and can't help you with those issues. Keep in mind that a sizable

majority of crashes are caused by misbehaving plugins so the first thing to

check when an issue appears is whether the issue is caused by a plugin or not.

1. Make sure your plugins are in the most current version available.

1. Disable plugins you have loaded (one by one) until you eliminate the source

of the crash.

If your crash happens on startup of the application, you can try renaming the

`prefs.xml` file in the `.purple` directory to something such as

`prefs.xml.old` to force a startup without plugins. Note that this means that

you will lose all settings stored there.

1. By now you should know whether the crash is caused by a plugin (ie only

happens when a specific plugin is enabled) or if it's an issue in Pidgin

itself.

1. If the issue is caused by a third party plugin, **report the issue to the

authors of the plugin**. Usually the authors specify how to submit issues

in the repository where the code of the plugin is hosted.

1. If the issue is caused by a plugin that comes built in to Pidgin or

happens with all plugins disabled then follow the instructions below to

submit a bug report to the Pidgin project.

### Steps for bug report submission

1. Ensure that you have read the [Before you submit any bug report]({{< ref

"#before-you-submit-any-bug-report" >}}) section. This will save you and the

Pidgin developers time.

1. Search our [issue tracking platform]({{< param "pidginIssuesURL" >}}) for

existing bug reports that match the issue you have encountered. This is to

ensure that we are not submitting a duplicate issue.

1. If the bug you are reporting is a previously unknown security vulnerability,

please read our [Security page]({{< ref "about/security" >}}) for details on

how to submit a security vulnerability report. It's of utmost importance that

security issues are not made public until we have the chance to fix them,

otherwise our users will be vulnerable until we are able to fix the issue and

release a new version of Pidgin.

1. If you checked all the steps we mentioned before, then go ahead and create

the issue in our [issue tracking platform]({{< param "pidginIssuesURL" >}}).

1. You need to be logged in to our issue tracker in order to submit issues.

If you don't already have an account, click on the Login button and from

there you'll have the option to either use use one of the social logins

available or create a new account directly in our [Jetbrains

Hub](https://hub.imfreedom.org) instance, which is the platform we use to

handle authentication.

1. Ensure you are logged in with your account in our [issue tracking

platform]({{< param "pidginIssuesURL" >}}).

1. Submit the bug report, take your time to describe the issue with as much

depth as possible and if you can it would also be important to provide the

steps needed to reproduce the issue. Another useful section that you may

want to checkout, particularly if the issue is about a crash in the

application itself, is the [Debugging Pidgin]({{< ref

"development/debugging" >}}) one since over there it's explained how to

obtain a debug log or a crash dump which will help Pidgin developers a lot

when looking at how to fix an issue.

## How to contribute code

We acknowledge that Pidgin leverages tools that a lot of developers may not be

familiar with so we created documentation that helps you getting started and at

the same time explains how our contribution process works.

[Instant Messaging Freedom Contributors Guide](https://docs.imfreedom.org/contributors-guide/)

If you have any questions about this process, remember that you have a variety

of [methods to reach out to us]({{< ref contact >}}).