CONTRIBUTING.md

Reporting Bugs and Asking Questions

Bug reports and questions are always welcome, though before asking whether a feature exists, please glance through the Proptest book and try the search feature built in to the API docs to see if they answer your question already.

Please include your rust version and proptest version in any reports. Also include your operating system if you think it is relevant.

Requesting New Features

Please be specific in feature requests and, as mentioned above, try to see whether feature does not already exist before requesting it.

There are no hard rules as to what features will or will not be accepted — ultimately, it depends on what the expected benefit is relative to the expected maintenance burden. However, here are some general guidelines.

The following will usually be accepted as new features:

• New widely-applicable utilities for generating values. The proptest::sample module is an example of such an accepted feature.

• Features which enable Proptest to be used in a context where it formerly was not. no_std is an example.

• Quality of life improvements, such as adding new forms for the macros or adding convenience functions.

The following will usually not be accepted as new features (but still might be if there is a sufficiently compelling reason):

• Direct integration with a third-party crate, in the sense of adding strategies or Abitrary implementation for that crate's types.

• Features which are too narrowly applicable. (Hypothetical example: a built-in strategy to generate valid streams of x86 instructions.)

• Features which are easier to mis-use than to use correctly, or which could lead to misunderstanding of how proptest is supposed to be used. (Example: adding a method directly on Strategy to generate values from it.)

Proptest is maintained on a volunteer basis. If your feature is large, consider implementing it yourself as a pull request. (Feel free of course to open an issue first for guidance.)

Pull Requests

Pull requests which fix bugs or add features are welcome. Below are some guidelines to keep in mind.

Formatting

Code is formatted with rustfmt. If you are using rustup, you can install it with rustup component add rustfmt.

Other files are wrapped to 80 columns where reasonably possible use Unix line endings. An exception is the run-tests.bat file which must use DOS line endings.

Copyright Headers

All source files start with the copyright header whose template is found at proptest/src/file-preamble.

When creating a new source file, insert the template and fill it out with the current year and either your name or "The proptest developers", at your choice.

When making non-trivial changes to an existing file, update the header to add the current year (separated from the previous by a comma) if not already there, and change the name to "The proptest developers" if the current name is neither that nor your own. Use your best judgement for what "non-trivial" is.

You retain copyright for any code you add to proptest.

Updating the changelog

If you make a change which is observable to proptest users (i.e. almost anything other than documentation changes or test code), add a note to the CHANGELOG.md for the crate.

If there is not already an ## Unreleased section at the top, create one. Under the Unreleased version, add a bullet point describing the change to one of the following subsections (ordered as follows):

• Breaking Changes
• Deprecations
• Bug Fixes
• New Additions
• Nightly-only Breakage
• Other Notes

Development Notes

Rust Version

It is generally easiest to work on proptest with the current stable Rust version. Do keep in mind though that proptest retains compatibility with an older version of Rust; you can find this in .travis.yml. Your pull request will automatically be checked against that Rust version so you don't need to worry about it too much unless that fails.

You need to use the latest nightly for the following:

• Working on nightly-only proptest features, including no_std support.

• Testing proptest-derive.

Coding

Within the proptest crate, you cannot refer to std outside of test code or code which is gated around the std feature flag. Instead, std names must be pulled from the std_facade module in Proptest.

Running Tests

To test the proptest crate, simply run cargo test -p proptest. If you are working on something not in the default proptest feature set, refer to .travis.yml for examples of how to test those features.

The test code for proptest has not been updated to work on no_std. Since no_std does not add novel code, we currently only test that it compiles.

Testing the proptest-derive crate currently requires nightly. Assuming you are using rustup, you can run its tests with cargo +nightly test -p proptest-derive. The tests can fail with mysterious errors if the proptest crate was previously built with a different configuration or a different Rust version. If you get build failures that don't seem to make sense, try running cargo clean and then try again.

Tests for test case persistence are not run as part of cargo test. To run them on Unix, run ./run-tests.sh in proptest/test-persistence-location. To run them on Windows, run run-tests.bat in proptest\test-persistence-location.

Automated Pull Request Checks

Your pull request will automatically be tested against a range of Rust versions and configurations, including both on Linux and Windows.

Generally, please try to address any failures of these tests yourself if you are able. There are however a couple classes of problems you do not need to concern yourself with:

• If a nightly-only feature has been broken by a change in the nightly distribution of Rust, do not worry about fixing it in your PR (unless of course that is the specific aim of your PR).

• Certain tests are known to occasionally fail spuriously. This most commonly happens on a time-sensitive test that can fail under the low-performance Appveyor environment. Certain tests have also generated random data and then made assertions about the results; these should all be deterministic now but some may have been missed.