open-standards/wai/CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing to WAI

WAI is a specification (SPEC.md and its extensions/) with a reference implementation in Rust (wai-rs/, with wai-quantum/ and the browser crate wai-web/). Both are pre-1.0 drafts: substantive changes are welcome.

The canonical repository is the forge at https://git.transaction.science/Transaction-Science/open-standards. Send changes there; mirrors of it are read-only.

To the specification

A change is in scope if it:

• names a real ambiguity in the text (point at the section and the case that breaks);
• adds a missing structural requirement (byte layout, conformance rule, dispatch behaviour) needed to make another implementation falsifiable;
• registers a capability with a byte-precise payload format and conformance vectors, not a placeholder (see Registering a capability, below).

A change is out of scope if it adds optional fields with no testable conformance effect. §8 says what a revision may change: a registered capability's payload format and role are fixed once registered, and a later edition of a standard that changes its bitstream takes a new capability string.

Registering a capability

REGISTRY.md states the procedure: add the string to the registry table in wai-rs/src/codecs/, register it in SPEC §5 under the same heading, run wai registry export, and link it from the codec glossary or list it there as having no entry. The tests hold SPEC, the registry and the exported files to the same set of strings.

To the reference implementation

Building

The default codecs feature links system codec libraries (libjxl, libavif, libopus, libdav1d, liblzma, libflac); without them the build stops in a codec crate's build script. Everything else builds without them, and CI builds that way:

cd wai-rs
cargo test --lib --no-default-features --features world,audio_scene,haptic,splat4d,score,provenance,neural_int,film
cargo run --no-default-features --bin wai -- capabilities

Name the features a change touches explicitly; cargo test with the defaults is not what CI runs.

Tests that CI must see

• A test file gated on a feature (#![cfg(feature = "...")]) compiles to an empty binary, which reports success, in any build without that feature. Declare it in wai-rs/Cargo.toml with a [[test]] stanza and required-features, and add --test <name> with the right --features to a step in .github/workflows/. A test no workflow names runs nowhere.
• A test that reads inputs from outside the tree skips without them. CI sets WAI_REQUIRE_SOTA_VECTORS=1 where it provides them, and a missing input then fails.
• Falsify every new test once: change the code it guards, show it fails, restore the code through git, and show it passes again.

Vectors

Committed conformance vectors and pinned hashes change only through their generator (the wai_*_vectors gen binaries and the export tools in tools/), never by hand. A test whose comment says its hex must never be edited to make it pass means exactly that.

Independent implementations

Conformance is defined by the committed corpora (*-conformance/) and the criteria of SPEC §7, not by agreement with this implementation's own tests. A second implementation in another language is validated against the same corpora; the OER receipt kernel in C (oer-conformance/settle/) is one.

Public text

The specification, the extensions, READMEs, research notes, code comments and the CHANGELOG state what WAI does, plainly:

• name no company, vendor, customer or commercial product. Standards, standards bodies, protocols, papers and open-source projects may be named, factually;
• make no comparisons with other products or approaches;
• give no counts that drift (crate counts, test counts, line counts).

Three checks enforce this. scripts/check-no-vanity-metrics.sh (opt-out marker allow-vanity: <reason>) and scripts/check-comparative-prose.sh (opt-out allow-phrase: <reason>, for an identifier or a quotation) run on every change. scripts/check-public-names.sh reads its patterns from a private list (the WAI_NAME_DENYLIST secret in CI, given only to the run on a push to main, so a pull request is checked when it lands); a functional identifier — a capability string, a model-hub id a tool defaults to, a repository URL, an OS API name, a security advisory id — is kept and its line marked allow-name: <reason>. Put the marker in a comment of the file's own syntax (<!-- ... -->, // ..., # ...); the reason must contain a letter or a digit. JSON has no comments, so a JSON file carries no such identifier: the codec glossary titles a format by its own name, FourCC, file extension or designation, and never by a company, a product or a person (glossary/SCHEMA.md). The checks fail closed: a pattern that does not compile, or any grep error, fails them, and scripts/test-public-text-checks.sh proves that on every run.

Dated research records are not rewritten: a correction is a dated annotation after the original text, and a name is redacted in place with a dated marker.

Licence

The specification and the reference implementation are Apache-2.0. By contributing, you agree your contribution is licensed under the same terms. Each payload and companion capability carries a licence class (royalty-free, patent-pool, proprietary, non-commercial) for implementing it, recorded in the registry; derivations carry the class codecs::derivation gives them; records carry none. Companion implementations outside this tree keep their own licences.

No CLA. The licence is the agreement.