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diff --git a/CONTRIBUTING.md b/CONTRIBUTING.md index 40351ddcfaa1..f4cb4a29ed07 100644 --- a/CONTRIBUTING.md +++ b/CONTRIBUTING.md @@ -18,6 +18,53 @@ You generally only need to submit a CLA once, so if you've already submitted one (even if it was for a different project), you probably don't need to do it again. +## Contribution Guidelines + +Potential contributors sometimes ask us if the Abseil project is the appropriate +home for their utility library code or for specific functions implementing +missing portions of the standard. Often, the answer to this question is "no". +We’d like to articulate our thinking on this issue so that our choices can be +understood by everyone and so that contributors can have a better intuition +about whether Abseil might be interested in adopting a new library. + +### Priorities + +Although our mission is to augment the C++ standard library, our goal is not to +provide a full forward-compatible implementation of the latest standard. For us +to consider a library for inclusion in Abseil, it is not enough that a library +is useful. We generally choose to release a library when it meets at least one +of the following criteria: + +* **Widespread usage** - Using our internal codebase to help gauge usage, most + of the libraries we've released have tens of thousands of users. +* **Anticipated widespread usage** - Pre-adoption of some standard-compliant + APIs may not have broad adoption initially but can be expected to pick up + usage when it replaces legacy APIs. `absl::from_chars`, for example, + replaces existing code that converts strings to numbers and will therefore + likely see usage growth. +* **High impact** - APIs that provide a key solution to a specific problem, + such as `absl::FixedArray`, have higher impact than usage numbers may signal + and are released because of their importance. +* **Direct support for a library that falls under one of the above** - When we + want access to a smaller library as an implementation detail for a + higher-priority library we plan to release, we may release it, as we did + with portions of `absl/meta/type_traits.h`. One consequence of this is that + the presence of a library in Abseil does not necessarily mean that other + similar libraries would be a high priority. + +### API Freeze Consequences + +Via the +[Abseil Compatibility Guidelines](https://abseil.io/about/compatibility), we +have promised a large degree of API stability. In particular, we will not make +backward-incompatible changes to released APIs without also shipping a tool or +process that can upgrade our users' code. We are not yet at the point of easily +releasing such tools. Therefore, at this time, shipping a library establishes an +API contract which is borderline unchangeable. (We can add new functionality, +but we cannot easily change existing behavior.) This constraint forces us to +very carefully review all APIs that we ship. + + ## Coding Style To keep the source consistent, readable, diffable and easy to merge, we use a |