| |
| Contributing to GDB |
| |
| GDB is a collaborative project and one which wants to encourage new |
| development. You may wish to fix GDB bugs, improve testing, port GDB |
| to a new platform, update documentation, add new GDB features, and the |
| like. To help with this, there is a lot of documentation |
| available.. In addition to the user guide and internals manual |
| included in the GDB distribution, the GDB web pages also contain much |
| information. |
| |
| You may also want to submit your change so that can be considered for |
| conclusion in a future version of GDB (see below). Regardless, we |
| encourage you to distribute the change yourself. |
| |
| If you don't feel up to hacking GDB, there are still plenty of ways to |
| help! You can answer questions on the mailing lists, write |
| documentation, find bugs, create a GDB related website (contribute to |
| the official GDB web site), or create a GDB related software |
| package. We welcome all of the above and feel free to ask on the GDB |
| mailing lists if you are looking for feedback or for people to review |
| a work in progress. |
| |
| Ref: http://sourceware.cygnus.com/gdb |
| |
| Finally, there are certain legal requirements and style issues which |
| all contributors need to be aware of. |
| |
| o Coding Standards |
| |
| All contributions must conform to the GNU Coding Standard. |
| http://www.gnu.ai.mit.edu/prep/standards_toc.html |
| Submissions which do not conform to the standards will be |
| returned with a request to reformat the changes. |
| |
| For GDB, that standard is more tightly defined. GDB's |
| coding standard is determined by the output of |
| gnu-indent. |
| |
| This situation came about because, by the start of '99, |
| GDB's coding style was so bad an inconsistent that it was |
| decided to restart things from scratch. |
| |
| |
| o Copyright Assignment |
| |
| There are certain legal requirements |
| |
| Before we can accept code contributions from you, we need a |
| copyright assignment form filled out. |
| |
| If you've developed some addition or patch to GDB that you |
| would like to contribute, you should fill out a copyright |
| assignment form and send it in to the FSF. We are unable to |
| use code from you until this is on-file at the FSF, so get |
| that paperwork in! This form covers one batch of changes. |
| Ref: http://gcc.gnu.org/fsf-forms/assignment-instructions.html |
| |
| If you think you're going to be doing continuing work on GDB, it |
| would be easier to use a different form, which arranges to |
| assign the copyright for all your future changes to GDB. It is |
| called assign.future. Please note that if you switch |
| employers, the new employer will need to fill out the |
| disclaim.future form; there is no need to fill out the |
| assign.future form again. |
| Ref: http://gcc.gnu.org/fsf-forms/assign.future |
| Ref: http://gcc.gnu.org/fsf-forms/disclaim.future |
| |
| There are several other forms you can fill out for different |
| circumstances (e.g. to contribute an entirely new program, to |
| contribute significant changes to a manual, etc.) |
| Ref: http://gcc.gnu.org/fsf-forms/copyrights.html |
| |
| Small changes can be accepted without a copyright assignment |
| form on file. |
| |
| This is pretty confusing! If you are unsure of what is |
| necessary, just ask the GDB mailing list and we'll figure out |
| what is best for you. |
| |
| Note: Many of these forms have a place for "name of |
| program". Insert the name of one program in that place -- in |
| this case, "GDB". |
| |
| |
| o Submitting Patches |
| |
| Every patch must have several pieces of information before we |
| can properly evaluate it. |
| |
| A description of the bug and how your patch fixes this |
| bug. A reference to a testsuite failure is very helpful. For |
| new features a description of the feature and your |
| implementation. |
| |
| A ChangeLog entry as plaintext (separate from the patch); see |
| the various ChangeLog files for format and content. Note that, |
| unlike some other projects, we do require ChangeLogs also for |
| documentation (i.e., .texi files). |
| |
| The patch itself. If you are accessing the CVS repository at: |
| Cygnus, use "cvs update; cvs diff -c3p"; else, use "diff -c3p |
| OLD NEW" or "diff -up OLD NEW". If your version of diff does |
| not support these options, then get the latest version of GNU |
| diff. |
| |
| We accept patches as plain text (preferred for the compilers |
| themselves), MIME attachments (preferred for the web pages), |
| or as uuencoded gzipped text. |
| |
| When you have all these pieces, bundle them up in a mail |
| message and send it to gdb-patches@sourceware.cygnus.com. All |
| patches and related discussion should be sent to the |
| gdb-patches mailinglist. For further information on the GDB |
| CVS repository, see the Anonymous read-only CVS access and |
| Read-write CVS access page. |
| |
| -- |
| |
| Supplemental information for GDB: |
| |
| o Please try to run the relevant testsuite before and after |
| committing a patch |
| |
| If the contributor doesn't do it then the maintainer will. A |
| contributor might include before/after test results in their |
| contribution. |
| |
| |
| o For bug fixes, please try to include a way of |
| demonstrating that the patch actually fixes something. |
| |
| The best way of doing this is to ensure that the |
| testsuite contains one or more test cases that |
| fail without the fix but pass with the fix. |
| |
| People are encouraged to submit patches that extend |
| the testsuite. |
| |
| |
| o Please read your patch before submitting it. |
| |
| A patch containing several unrelated changes or |
| arbitrary reformats will be returned with a request |
| to re-formatting / split it. |
| |
| |
| o If ``gdb/configure.in'' is modified then you don't |
| need to include patches to the regenerated file |
| ``configure''. |
| |
| The maintainer will re-generate those files |
| using autoconf (2.13 as of 2000-02-29). |