| 1 | |
| 2 | Contributing to GDB |
| 3 | |
| 4 | GDB is a collaborative project and one which wants to encourage new |
| 5 | development. You may wish to fix GDB bugs, improve testing, port GDB |
| 6 | to a new platform, update documentation, add new GDB features, and the |
| 7 | like. To help with this, there is a lot of documentation |
| 8 | available.. In addition to the user guide and internals manual |
| 9 | included in the GDB distribution, the GDB web pages also contain much |
| 10 | information. |
| 11 | |
| 12 | You may also want to submit your change so that can be considered for |
| 13 | conclusion in a future version of GDB (see below). Regardless, we |
| 14 | encourage you to distribute the change yourself. |
| 15 | |
| 16 | If you don't feel up to hacking GDB, there are still plenty of ways to |
| 17 | help! You can answer questions on the mailing lists, write |
| 18 | documentation, find bugs, create a GDB related website (contribute to |
| 19 | the official GDB web site), or create a GDB related software |
| 20 | package. We welcome all of the above and feel free to ask on the GDB |
| 21 | mailing lists if you are looking for feedback or for people to review |
| 22 | a work in progress. |
| 23 | |
| 24 | Ref: http://sourceware.cygnus.com/gdb |
| 25 | |
| 26 | Finally, there are certain legal requirements and style issues which |
| 27 | all contributors need to be aware of. |
| 28 | |
| 29 | o Coding Standards |
| 30 | |
| 31 | All contributions must conform to the GNU Coding Standard. |
| 32 | http://www.gnu.ai.mit.edu/prep/standards_toc.html |
| 33 | Submissions which do not conform to the standards will be |
| 34 | returned with a request to reformat the changes. |
| 35 | |
| 36 | For GDB, that standard is more tightly defined. GDB's |
| 37 | coding standard is determined by the output of |
| 38 | gnu-indent. |
| 39 | |
| 40 | This situation came about because, by the start of '99, |
| 41 | GDB's coding style was so bad an inconsistent that it was |
| 42 | decided to restart things from scratch. |
| 43 | |
| 44 | |
| 45 | o Copyright Assignment |
| 46 | |
| 47 | There are certain legal requirements |
| 48 | |
| 49 | Before we can accept code contributions from you, we need a |
| 50 | copyright assignment form filled out. |
| 51 | |
| 52 | If you've developed some addition or patch to GDB that you |
| 53 | would like to contribute, you should fill out a copyright |
| 54 | assignment form and send it in to the FSF. We are unable to |
| 55 | use code from you until this is on-file at the FSF, so get |
| 56 | that paperwork in! This form covers one batch of changes. |
| 57 | Ref: http://gcc.gnu.org/fsf-forms/assignment-instructions.html |
| 58 | |
| 59 | If you think you're going to be doing continuing work on GDB, it |
| 60 | would be easier to use a different form, which arranges to |
| 61 | assign the copyright for all your future changes to GDB. It is |
| 62 | called assign.future. Please note that if you switch |
| 63 | employers, the new employer will need to fill out the |
| 64 | disclaim.future form; there is no need to fill out the |
| 65 | assign.future form again. |
| 66 | Ref: http://gcc.gnu.org/fsf-forms/assign.future |
| 67 | Ref: http://gcc.gnu.org/fsf-forms/disclaim.future |
| 68 | |
| 69 | There are several other forms you can fill out for different |
| 70 | circumstances (e.g. to contribute an entirely new program, to |
| 71 | contribute significant changes to a manual, etc.) |
| 72 | Ref: http://gcc.gnu.org/fsf-forms/copyrights.html |
| 73 | |
| 74 | Small changes can be accepted without a copyright assignment |
| 75 | form on file. |
| 76 | |
| 77 | This is pretty confusing! If you are unsure of what is |
| 78 | necessary, just ask the GDB mailing list and we'll figure out |
| 79 | what is best for you. |
| 80 | |
| 81 | Note: Many of these forms have a place for "name of |
| 82 | program". Insert the name of one program in that place -- in |
| 83 | this case, "GDB". |
| 84 | |
| 85 | |
| 86 | o Submitting Patches |
| 87 | |
| 88 | Every patch must have several pieces of information before we |
| 89 | can properly evaluate it. |
| 90 | |
| 91 | A description of the bug and how your patch fixes this |
| 92 | bug. A reference to a testsuite failure is very helpful. For |
| 93 | new features a description of the feature and your |
| 94 | implementation. |
| 95 | |
| 96 | A ChangeLog entry as plaintext (separate from the patch); see |
| 97 | the various ChangeLog files for format and content. Note that, |
| 98 | unlike some other projects, we do require ChangeLogs also for |
| 99 | documentation (i.e., .texi files). |
| 100 | |
| 101 | The patch itself. If you are accessing the CVS repository at: |
| 102 | Cygnus, use "cvs update; cvs diff -c3p"; else, use "diff -c3p |
| 103 | OLD NEW" or "diff -up OLD NEW". If your version of diff does |
| 104 | not support these options, then get the latest version of GNU |
| 105 | diff. |
| 106 | |
| 107 | We accept patches as plain text (preferred for the compilers |
| 108 | themselves), MIME attachments (preferred for the web pages), |
| 109 | or as uuencoded gzipped text. |
| 110 | |
| 111 | When you have all these pieces, bundle them up in a mail |
| 112 | message and send it to gdb-patches@sourceware.cygnus.com. All |
| 113 | patches and related discussion should be sent to the |
| 114 | gdb-patches mailinglist. For further information on the GDB |
| 115 | CVS repository, see the Anonymous read-only CVS access and |
| 116 | Read-write CVS access page. |
| 117 | |
| 118 | -- |
| 119 | |
| 120 | Supplemental information for GDB: |
| 121 | |
| 122 | o Please try to run the relevant testsuite before and after |
| 123 | committing a patch |
| 124 | |
| 125 | If the contributor doesn't do it then the maintainer will. A |
| 126 | contributor might include before/after test results in their |
| 127 | contribution. |
| 128 | |
| 129 | |
| 130 | o For bug fixes, please try to include a way of |
| 131 | demonstrating that the patch actually fixes something. |
| 132 | |
| 133 | The best way of doing this is to ensure that the |
| 134 | testsuite contains one or more test cases that |
| 135 | fail without the fix but pass with the fix. |
| 136 | |
| 137 | People are encouraged to submit patches that extend |
| 138 | the testsuite. |
| 139 | |
| 140 | |
| 141 | o Please read your patch before submitting it. |
| 142 | |
| 143 | A patch containing several unrelated changes or |
| 144 | arbitrary reformats will be returned with a request |
| 145 | to re-formatting / split it. |
| 146 | |
| 147 | |
| 148 | o If ``gdb/configure.in'' is modified then you don't |
| 149 | need to include patches to the regenerated file |
| 150 | ``configure''. |
| 151 | |
| 152 | The maintainer will re-generate those files |
| 153 | using autoconf (2.13 as of 2000-02-29). |