The following policy applies if you make a contribution to Smithay's code, documentation, issues, comments, artwork or any other type of resource.
It is your responsibility to ensure that:
- You fully understand how the code in your contribution works.
- Your change is accurately described in the commit message.
- Your contribution is tested and working as described.
- To the best of your knowledge, you are not introducing bugs; any exceptions to this rule must be presented with clear reasoning.
- You are not violating copyright (such as software licenses, creative commons or any other). (See also our DCO.)
- Use of any AI generated code or documentation is clearly indicated in your commit messages.
If you repeatedly fail to meet these standards, your contributions will no longer be considered by Smithay's maintainers and possibly removed without further notice.
Due to the requirements listed above, we strongly advise against using large language models or other probabilistic tools such as Copilot and ChatGPT. Code produced by these systems is usually more difficult to reason about and fails to express important technical design decisions in a concise form. This results in additional maintainer burden, draining the (already limited) time and energy of our reviewers. Additionally, the legal circumstances of the training sets these tools are based on are subject of active legal proceedings, which puts the copyright of generated contributions into question.
Last but not least, we ask you to not use generative AI to write comments or descriptions on our issue tracker, discussions and pull requests. In our experience these tools tend to generate very inconcise text and more often incorrect statements about the cause of underlying issues or code.
If you rely on such tools to make up for a language barrier, we strongly encourage you to use (ML-based or otherwise) translation tools as our maintainers much prefer to deal with imperfect english than generated walls of text. Many of us aren't native english speakers as well.