opustags/CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing to opustags

opustags is slowing getting more mature, and contributions are welcome.

Before you open a pull request, you might want to talk about the change you'd like to make to make sure it's relevant. In that case, feel free to open an issue. You can expect a response within a week.

Submitting pull requests

opustags has nothing really special, so basic git etiquette is just enough.

Please make focused pull requests, one feature at a time. Don't make huge commits. Give clear names to your commits and pull requests. Extended descriptions are welcome.

Stay objective in your changes. Adding a feature or fixing a bug is a clear improvement, but stylistic changes like renaming a function or moving a few braces around won't help the project move forward.

You should check that your changes don't break the test suite by running make check

Following these practices is important to keep the history clean, and to allow for better code reviews.

History of opustags

opustags is originally a small project made to fill a need to edit tags in Opus audio files when most taggers didn't support Opus at all. It was written in C with libogg, and should be very light and fast compared to most alternatives. However, because it was written on a whim, the code is hardly structured and might even be fragile, who knows.

An ambitious desire to rewrite it in C++ with bells and whistles gave birth to the next branch, but sadly it wasn't finalized and is currently not usable, though it contains good pieces of code.

With the growing support of Opus in tag editors, the usefulness of opustags was questioned, and it was thus abandoned for a few years. Judging by the inquiries and contributions, albeit few, on GitHub, it looks like it remains relevant, so let's dust it off a bit.

Today, opustags is written in C++14 and features a unit test suite in C++, and an integration test suite in Perl. The code was refactored, organized into modules, and reviewed for safety.

The next release will focus on correctness, with the following technical objectives:

1. Validate the comments: field name in ASCII and value in UTF-8.
2. Allow selecting the stream to edit, instead of assuming the Ogg contains only one Opus stream.
3. Provide an --escape option for escaping the newlines inside comment strings.
4. Take into account the system's encoding: the tags must always be stored as UTF-8, and converted from and to the console encoding when reading input or printing.
5. Maybe provide a --binary option to dump the raw OpusTags packet, that can be combined to --set-all to read it back.