contributing to libtorrent

There are several ways to contribute to libtorrent at various levels. Any help is much appreciated. If you're interested in something libtorrent related that's not enumerated on this page, please contact arvid@libtorrent.org or the mailing list.

1. Testing

   This is not just limited to finding bugs and ways to reproduce crashes, but also sub-optimal behavior is certain scenarios and finding ways to reproduce those. Please report any issue to the bug tracker at github.

   New features that need testing are streaming (set_piece_deadline()), the different choking algorithms (like the rate-based choker).

   Additional fuzzers are also always welcome. Find a libtorrent interface that's not already covered by a fuzzer (see the fuzzers directory in the root) and add a new fuzzer to it. Alternatively, improve an existing fuzzer by producing inputs that gets coverage deeper in to libtorrent.

2. Documentation

   Finding typos or outdated sections in the documentation. Contributing documentation based on your own experience and experimentation with the library or with BitTorrent in general. Non-reference documentation is very much welcome as well, higher level descriptions on how to configure libtorrent for various situations for instance. The reference documentation for libtorrent is generated from the header files.

   Each heading in the online documentation has a short-cut link to file a new issue against the documentation.

   For updates, please submit a pull request. All documentation is in restructured text (rst). All documentation is spell checked with hunspell which can be invoked via make spell-check in the docs directory. If words are missing, please add them to docs/hunspell/libtorrent.dic

3. Code

   Contributing code for new features or bug-fixes is highly welcome. If you're interested in adding a feature but not sure where to start, please contact the mailing list or #libtorrent @ irc.freenode.net. For proposed fixes or updates, please submit a pull request.

   New features might be better support for integrating with other services, new choking algorithms, seeding policies, ports to new platforms etc.

For an overview of the internals of libtorrent, see the hacking page.

For outstanding things to do, see the todo list.