Collaborate With Us

We warmly welcome external contributions to ROOT! By providing code, you agree to transfer your copyright on the code to the “ROOT project”. Of course you will be duly credited and your name will appear on the contributors page and in the CREDITS file shipped with every binary and source distribution. The copyright transfer is necessary for us to be able to effectively defend the project in case of litigation.

Presently, there are two ways in which you can contribute:

  1. Via the Users’ contribution section in the Forum
    The Users’ Forum has a section which describes how to submit contributions. It is the easiest way to make your code known to the community, even if it will not be automatically integrated in ROOT. Of course the most successful contributions will become part of the repository!

  2. Sending Patches
    You can send us a patch or a pull request with Github, provided that you follow these two simple rules:

    • Make sure you follow the ROOT coding conventions in your code
    • Make sure you provide a set of tests for your feature/bug fix
    • Make sure your git commits can be added to ROOT’s master branch with a “rebase and merge”, i.e. by fast-forwarding the master branch. This can be easily done by git-rebasing your branch on ROOT’s master branch. ROOT tries to avoid noisy merge commits as much as possible, so that the log remains mostly linear and easy to understand at a glance.

Often it is useful to contact us first to discuss the code you want to develop or the bug you want to fix.

Picking up an Idea

We maintain a set of “ideas” for talented scientists and developers to pick up. An “idea” is a sketch of a development project, a functionality a missing feature we would like to see in our tool, in your ROOT! You can inspect the ideas in the following list.

Ideas

Completed ideas