We welcome everyone to contribute to our projects by submitting an issue or a pull request to any of the repository hosted in our [Vac](https://github.com/vacp2p) GitHub page.
**We consider and encourage anonymous contributions!**
For this reason, we collect some advice on how to contribute pseudonymously to Vac.
## Setting-up a new Github account
Having a GitHub account will enormously simplify your contribution process,
since you will be able to open issues and PRs directly in the repository of your interest and interact with other contributors.
We acknowledge that this implies that GitHub, in order to provide you its services,
needs to process some (potentially sensitive) information about you, like your IP address, e-mail address, browser configuration, cookies, and so on
(for a complete list see [here](https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/privacy-policies/github-privacy-statement#what-information-github-collects)).
To mitigate leakage of such potentially sensitive information, you might:
- use a [VPN](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_private_network) or [TOR](https://www.torproject.org/);
- register a new dedicated e-mail address with a privacy-focused provider (e.g., [Proton](https://proton.me))
- register a new GitHub account with such dedicated e-mail address;
- eventually setup 2FA using hardware keys or an open source authenticator app that does not collect personal information
(e.g., [andOTP](https://github.com/andOTP/andOTP) for Android and [Tofu](https://github.com/calleluks/Tofu) for iOS);
- generate a new and dedicated public key to sign commits with the newly created account;
Be aware of [device fingerprinting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Device_fingerprint)!
To mitigate this, you could:
- use a dedicated browser which minimizes fingerprint leakages (e.g., TOR browser);
- navigate from a dedicated live or virtual machine running an
[open-source and privacy-oriented operating system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security-focused_operating_system) (e.g., by using the [QEMU](https://github.com/qemu/qemu)/[KVM](https://www.linux-kvm.org) stack)
## Contribute by e-mail
If you are not interested in setting up a dedicated GitHub account or you plan to contribute occasionally,
you can send us your commits in the form of [*mail patches*](https://git-scm.com/docs/git-format-patch).
After cloning the repository of your interest, remember to run
```
git config user.name "Anonymous"
git config user.email anonymous@example.com
```
to override the username and mail address used in local commits to the repository.
If you plan to contribute to a specific branch `<branch>`,
we suggest you to create and locally work on a new branch `<new_branch>` based on it, i.e.
```
git checkout <branch>
git branch <new_branch>
git checkout <new_branch>
```
Once your local contribution is ready to be published, run
```
git format-patch <branch> -o <folder>
```
to store in `<folder>` all patch files corresponding to your commits that will update `<branch>` to the latest state of `<new_branch>`.
Once done, send us an email to **`contribute@vac.dev`** providing as
- object: the repository name you have worked on and the commit hash at the time of your local branch creation;
- body message: a short description of your contribution;
- attachments: all `.patch` files in `<folder>`.
Note that we automatically discard e-mails containing one or more attachments which do not have a `.patch` extension.
Once received, we will review your contribution and eventually create a pull request on your behalf.
#### E-Mail Encryption
Our `contribute@vac.dev` e-mail address is based on [Proton](https://proton.me) services.
When you write us from a (dedicated) Proton e-mail address, your messages and attachments will be [automatically](https://proton.me/support/how-to-use-pgp) end-to-end encrypted using PGP.
If you don't have a Proton e-mail address, you can directly encrypt the contents of your message using our PGP public key:
