inbuxa-server/CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing

Patches, bug reports and questions are welcome.

Before a pull request

Open an issue first for anything substantial. A feature or a refactor is worth agreeing on before it is written, because this is a fork that tracks upstream: a change that moves code around costs a conflict on every import, and it should be worth that.

Small fixes — a bug, a typo, a test — need no ceremony. Send them.

Sending a change

New accounts on git.coffeylabs.org can file issues but can't push or fork. Until you have repository access, open an issue for the change, or say hello on community.coffeylabs.org, and attach the change to the issue as a patch:

git format-patch origin/main --stdout > my-change.patch

Repository access goes to volunteers we have worked with; a few good issues or patches is the usual way in. After that you push a branch here and open a pull request. The GitHub copy is a read-only mirror, so pull requests opened there are not merged.

How a change lands

main is protected. It cannot be force-pushed or deleted, and a change reaches it through a pull request whose build check has passed. No approving review is required — this is a small project and a gate nobody can pass is not a gate — but the build is not optional.

So the shape of a change is: a branch, a pull request, a green CI run, a merge. Branches are deleted on merge. Repository administrators can bypass the rule, which exists so the maintainer can correct the tree quickly, not so that the ordinary path can be skipped; use it for an emergency, not for convenience.

Releases are cut weekly from main by .github/workflows/release.yml, on Monday morning UTC, and nothing is released on a quiet week. That is the reason the rule matters: whatever is on main when the run starts is what ships, so main is expected to be releasable at all times rather than at the end of a piece of work. A change that is not finished should be behind something that defaults to off, or it should not be on main yet.

What this repository is

INBUXA is a fork of Stalwart, taken under the AGPL-3.0-only half of its dual licence, with nine features rebuilt independently. Two things follow:

• The clean room is real. The rebuilt features in crates/features were written from specifications in docs/spec/features/, by people who had not read Stalwart's Enterprise source. If you have read it, say so in the pull request and it will be reviewed with that in mind, or declined for the parts it touches. Nothing about this is personal: the project's defence of independent creation is a record, and the record has to be true.
• Upstream files stay recognisable. Changes to files that came from upstream are kept small and marked with an inbuxa: comment saying which requirement they serve, so the next import merges cleanly and a reader can tell fork from base. New work belongs in the fork's own crates where it can.

Licence and provenance

Contributions are under AGPL-3.0-only. Keep upstream's copyright headers where they are; if you change a file that came from upstream, leave its "Modified by Coffey Labs" line in place. New files carry:

/*
 * SPDX-FileCopyrightText: 2026 Coffey Labs LLC
 *
 * SPDX-License-Identifier: AGPL-3.0-only
 */

If you bring in code from another project, it stays under its own licence and its notice goes in THIRD-PARTY.md. tools/fork/strip.py reports any file that is missing from there on every import.

Running the tests

cargo test -p tests runs what needs nothing but a store on disk. The rest need containers, a particular backend, or a copy of real data, and are #[ignore]d:

• docs/spec/container-tests.md — the suites that need containers, with the STORE each one wants and what a plain regression leaves failing.
• docs/spec/compat-tests.md — the compatibility set, which needs a copy of a real server's data.

Run one suite at a time. They bind fixed ports, and the timing checks flake if two run at once.

Commit messages

Say what changed and why, in prose, wrapped at 72 characters or so. The why is the part that is hard to recover later. No tool trailers.