How to Join and Contribute to the openEuler Community: A Step‑by‑Step Guide

openEuler Community Overview

openEuler has built a community with partners, OSVs, ISVs, and an emerging governance structure. New engineers often find the processes unfamiliar, so this document simplifies the participation journey.

Legal Compliance

Before contributing, engineers must sign the CLA at https://openeuler.org/en/cla.html . The community accepts only open‑source licensed software; the default license is Mulan PSL‑2.0 ( https://opensource.org/licenses/MulanPSL-2.0 ).

Participation Methods

Submit requirements or bugs (issues).

Fix bugs by submitting patches (pull requests).

Contribute software packages.

Develop new software and integrate it into openEuler.

Website and Community Links

Main portal: https://openeuler.org/

Developer entry point: https://openeuler.org/zh/developer.html

Gitee code hosting: https://gitee.com/openeuler/ and https://gitee.com/src-openeuler

Issue Workflow

Issues are created via the "Issues" button in each repository (e.g., kernel: https://gitee.com/openeuler/kernel ). Issues can be filed to specific repos, the infrastructure repo, the community repo, or a catch‑all issue repo.

Pull‑Request Workflow

1. Fork the target repo to your own account. 2. Create a branch, make code changes, and submit a pull request (PR) back to the original repo. 3. Provide a clear title and description. The maintainer reviews the PR and may accept, reject, or request changes.

Software Packaging

Linux packages are mainly RPM (used by openEuler, Red Hat, SUSE) and DEB (used by Debian, Ubuntu). To add a package:

Create a Git repository for the package.

Upload the spec file and source archive.

Integrate the package into the openEuler OBS build system.

Spec files must follow the community’s RPM guidelines ( packaging guide ).

SIG Groups and Organization

Special Interest Groups (SIGs) organize contributors by interest. SIGs are listed at https://gitee.com/openeuler/community/tree/master/sig . New SIGs can be proposed via a PR to the community repository and reviewed by the Technical Committee.

Practical Tips

Ensure the package builds locally on both x86_64 and ARM64.

Verify correct install, uninstall, upgrade, and functionality.

Declare all runtime dependencies; missing dependencies must be added to openEuler as well.

Follow the spec file conventions to keep the build system stable.

By following these steps, engineers can smoothly start their first real openEuler contribution and later move on to adding new packages or developing original software.