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Contributing in Issues
For any issue, there are fundamentally three ways an individual can contribute:
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By opening the issue for discussion: For instance, if you believe that you have discovered a bug in Tokio, creating a new issue in the tokio-rs/tokio issue tracker is the way to report it.
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By helping to triage the issue: This can be done by providing supporting details (a test case that demonstrates a bug), providing suggestions on how to address the issue, or ensuring that the issue is tagged correctly.
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By helping to resolve the issue: Typically this is done either in the form of demonstrating that the issue reported is not a problem after all, or more often, by opening a Pull Request that changes some bit of something in Tokio in a concrete and reviewable manner.
Anybody can participate in any stage of contribution. We urge you to participate in the discussion around bugs and participate in reviewing PRs.
Asking for General Help
If you have reviewed existing documentation and still have questions or are having problems, you can open a discussion asking for help.
In exchange for receiving help, we ask that you contribute back a documentation PR that helps others avoid the problems that you encountered.
Submitting a Bug Report
When opening a new issue in the Tokio issue tracker, you will be presented with a basic template that should be filled in. If you believe that you have uncovered a bug, please fill out this form, following the template to the best of your ability. Do not worry if you cannot answer every detail, just fill in what you can.
The two most important pieces of information we need in order to properly evaluate the report is a description of the behavior you are seeing and a simple test case we can use to recreate the problem on our own. If we cannot recreate the issue, it becomes impossible for us to fix.
In order to rule out the possibility of bugs introduced by userland code, test cases should be limited, as much as possible, to using only Tokio APIs.
See How to create a Minimal, Complete, and Verifiable example.
Triaging a Bug Report
Once an issue has been opened, it is not uncommon for there to be discussion around it. Some contributors may have differing opinions about the issue, including whether the behavior being seen is a bug or a feature. This discussion is part of the process and should be kept focused, helpful, and professional.
Short, clipped responses—that provide neither additional context nor supporting detail—are not helpful or professional. To many, such responses are simply annoying and unfriendly.
Contributors are encouraged to help one another make forward progress as much as possible, empowering one another to solve issues collaboratively. If you choose to comment on an issue that you feel either is not a problem that needs to be fixed, or if you encounter information in an issue that you feel is incorrect, explain why you feel that way with additional supporting context, and be willing to be convinced that you may be wrong. By doing so, we can often reach the correct outcome much faster.
Resolving a Bug Report
In the majority of cases, issues are resolved by opening a Pull Request. The process for opening and reviewing a Pull Request is similar to that of opening and triaging issues, but carries with it a necessary review and approval workflow that ensures that the proposed changes meet the minimal quality and functional guidelines of the Tokio project.