code.delx.au - gnu-emacs/blob - CONTRIBUTE

   1
   2                         Contributing to Emacs
   3
   4 Emacs is a collaborative project and one which wants to encourage new
   5 development.  You may wish to fix Emacs bugs, improve testing, port
   6 Emacs to a new platform, update documentation, add new Emacs features,
   7 and the like.  To help with this, there is a lot of documentation
   8 available.  In addition to the user guide and Lisp Reference Manual in
   9 the Emacs distribution, the Emacs 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 Emacs (see below).
  14
  15 If you don't feel up to hacking Emacs, there are still plenty of ways to
  16 help!  You can answer questions on the mailing lists, write
  17 documentation, find bugs, create a Emacs related website (contribute to
  18 the official Emacs web site), or create a Emacs related software
  19 package.  We welcome all of the above and feel free to ask on the Emacs
  20 mailing lists if you are looking for feedback or for people to review a
  21 work in progress.
  22
  23 Ref: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/
  24
  25 Finally, there are certain legal requirements and style issues which
  26 all contributors need to be aware of.
  27
  28 o       Coding Standards
  29
  30         All contributions must conform to the GNU Coding Standard.
  31         Submissions which do not conform to the standards will be
  32         returned with a request to reformat the changes.
  33
  34         Emacs has certain additional coding requirements.
  35
  36         Ref: http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards_toc.html
  37
  38
  39 o       Copyright Assignment
  40
  41         Before we can accept code contributions from you, we need a
  42         copyright assignment form filled out and filed with the FSF.
  43
  44         See some documentation by the FSF for details and contact us
  45         via the Emacs mailing list to obtain the relevant
  46         forms.
  47
  48         Small changes can be accepted without a copyright assignment
  49         form on file.
  50
  51         Ref: http://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain.html#SEC6
  52
  53
  54 o       Getting the Source Code
  55
  56         The latest version of Emacs can be downloaded using CVS or Arch
  57         from the Savannah web site.  It is important that you submit
  58         your patch using this version, as any bug in a released version
  59         of Emacs may already be fixed.  It also makes it easier for
  60         others to test your patch,
  61
  62         Ref: http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/emacs
  63
  64
  65 o       Submitting Patches
  66
  67         Every patch must have several pieces of information before we
  68         can properly evaluate it.
  69
  70         For bug fixes, a description of the bug and how your patch fixes
  71         this bug.
  72
  73         For new features, a description of the feature and your
  74         implementation.
  75
  76         A ChangeLog entry as plaintext (separate from the patch); see
  77         the various ChangeLog files for format and content. Note that,
  78         unlike some other projects, we do require ChangeLogs also for
  79         documentation (i.e., .texi files).
  80
  81         The patch itself. If you are accessing the CVS repository use
  82         "cvs update; cvs diff -cp"; else, use "diff -cp OLD NEW" or
  83         "diff -up OLD NEW". If your version of diff does not support
  84         these options, then get the latest version of GNU diff.
  85
  86         We accept patches as plain text (preferred for the compilers
  87         themselves), MIME attachments (preferred for the web pages),
  88         or as uuencoded gzipped text.
  89
  90         When you have all these pieces, bundle them up in a mail message
  91         and send it to emacs-pretest-bug@gnu.org or emacs-devel@gnu.org.
  92         All patches and related discussion should be sent to the
  93         emacs-pretest-bug mailinglist.
  94
  95
  96 o       Please read your patch before submitting it.
  97
  98         A patch containing several unrelated changes or
  99         arbitrary reformats will be returned with a request
 100         to re-formatting / split it.
 101
 102
 103 o       Supplemental information for Emacs Developers:
 104
 105         If you wish to contribute to Emacs on a regular basis then
 106         you may be given write access to the CVS repository.
 107
 108         Discussion about Emacs development takes place on
 109         emacs-devel@gnu.org.
 110
 111         Think carefully about whether your change requires updating the
 112         documentation.  If it does, you can either do this yourself or
 113         add an item to the NEWS file.
 114
 115         The best way to understand Emacs Internals is to read the code
 116         but there is also a node "GNU Emacs Internals" in the Appendix
 117         of the Emacs Lisp Reference Manual that may help.
 118
 119         The file DEBUG describes how to debug Emacs.
 120
 121         Avoid using `defadvice' or `eval-after-load' for lisp
 122         code to be included in Emacs.