Contributing Guide

The canonical guidance for working in this repository — development environment, build/test commands, the architecture deep-dive, testing notes, the CI pipeline, and commit-message conventions — lives in AGENTS.md at the repo root. It is written for both human contributors and AI coding assistants. This page covers the one thing most contributors hit first: building without Nix.

Developing without Nix

Contributors who don’t use Nix can build and test the workspace directly once the system packages are installed. Two repo helpers automate this:

• .claude/hooks/session-start.sh installs the build + runtime packages, ensures the rustfmt/clippy rustup components, and warms the crate cache. It is gated on $CLAUDE_CODE_REMOTE, so it only runs in the Claude Code cloud env; on another machine, run the apt/dnf/pacman command for your distro instead.
• scripts/dev-container.sh drops you into a Fedora 42 shell (matching the Dockerfile/CI) with your working tree bind-mounted, for building waydriver-fixture-gtk and running the native e2e suite. These need libadwaita ≥ 1.6, so they can’t build on Ubuntu 24.04 (which ships 1.5).

On a non-Nix host, build and test the rest of the workspace with --exclude waydriver-fixture-gtk, and set GST_PLUGIN_PATH, XDG_DATA_DIRS, and the at-spi2-core/libexec path yourself when running the raw binary (the nix run .#mcp wrapper that injects these is Nix-only). See AGENTS.md for details.