contributing

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title: Contributing permalink: /contributing parent: Development nav_order: 20

Contributing

Thanks for helping improve SimpleZipDrive!

Reporting issues

• Crashes and warnings are reported automatically by the built-in error reporter (filtered to genuine defects — see Security & Privacy for the payload and opt-out).
• For anything else, open an issue at github.com/purelogiccode/SimpleZipDrive/issues and include:
  • variant (Dokan/WinFsp) and version (Help → About),
  • Windows version and architecture (x64/ARM64),
  • the session log from %LOCALAPPDATA%\SimpleZipDrive\Temp\Logs\ (and the winfsp_debug_*.log for WinFsp mount problems),
  • for performance reports: the filesystem driver version — this matters more than the app version.
• Check Troubleshooting and the automatic-report status first — many issues (wrong password, corrupt archive, occupied mount point) are expected behaviour, not bugs.

Pull requests

1. Fork, create a feature branch from master.
2. Follow the development conventions — the build must stay analyzer-warning-clean (Meziantou + Roslynator).
3. Add/adjust tests: shared behaviour → Core test classes; driver-specific behaviour → the mirrored WinFsp\* classes. Run dotnet test SimpleZipDrive.Tests -c Release (CI runs the same suite on every push/PR).
4. Keep changes focused; update WhatsNew.md for user-visible changes (it is tracked in the repository and ships inside every bundle).
5. Open the PR against master with a short description of the behaviour change and how you verified it (manual mount tests count — mention variant, mount type, elevation). The CI workflow must be green before merge.

Good first contributions: documentation fixes, additional test coverage for ZipFileSystemCore, troubleshooting entries for error messages not yet covered.

Licensing

• SimpleZipDrive is GPL v3 — contributions are accepted under the same license.
• Third-party components and their licenses:
  • DokanNet — MIT (Dokan driver LGPL/BSD terms per its repository)
  • WinFsp — LGPL-3.0 (GPLv3 with FLOSS exception for the driver)
  • SharpCompress — MIT
  • SharpSevenZip — MIT
  • ZArchiveSharp — MIT
  • XISOSharp — MIT
  • Serilog — Apache-2.0
  • 7-Zip (7z.dll) — LGPL / unRAR restrictions, per 7-Zip licensing

By contributing you confirm your changes are your own work and may be licensed under GPL v3 as part of this project.