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authorNick Roberts <nickrob@snap.net.nz>2006-07-04 01:16:51 +0000
committerNick Roberts <nickrob@snap.net.nz>2006-07-04 01:16:51 +0000
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+
+ Contributing to Emacs
+
+Emacs is a collaborative project and one which wants to encourage new
+development. You may wish to fix Emacs bugs, improve testing, port
+Emacs to a new platform, update documentation, add new Emacs features,
+and the like. To help with this, there is a lot of documentation
+available. In addition to the user guide and Lisp Reference Manual in
+the Emacs distribution, the Emacs 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 Emacs (see below).
+
+If you don't feel up to hacking Emacs, there are still plenty of ways to
+help! You can answer questions on the mailing lists, write
+documentation, find bugs, create a Emacs related website (contribute to
+the official Emacs web site), or create a Emacs related software
+package. We welcome all of the above and feel free to ask on the Emacs
+mailing lists if you are looking for feedback or for people to review a
+work in progress.
+
+Ref: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/
+
+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.
+ Submissions which do not conform to the standards will be
+ returned with a request to reformat the changes.
+
+ Emacs has certain additional coding requirements.
+
+ Ref: http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards_toc.html
+
+
+o Copyright Assignment
+
+ Before we can accept code contributions from you, we need a
+ copyright assignment form filled out and filed with the FSF.
+
+ See some documentation by the FSF for details and contact us
+ via the Emacs mailing list to obtain the relevant
+ forms.
+
+ Small changes can be accepted without a copyright assignment
+ form on file.
+
+ Ref: http://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain.html#SEC6
+
+
+o Getting the Source Code
+
+ The latest version of Emacs can be downloaded using CVS or Arch
+ from the Savannah web site. It is important that you submit
+ your patch using this version, as any bug in a released version
+ of Emacs may already be fixed. It also makes it easier for
+ others to test your patch,
+
+ Ref: http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/emacs
+
+
+o Submitting Patches
+
+ Every patch must have several pieces of information before we
+ can properly evaluate it.
+
+ For bug fixes, a description of the bug and how your patch fixes
+ this bug.
+
+ 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 use
+ "cvs update; cvs diff -cp"; else, use "diff -cp 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 emacs-pretest-bug@gnu.org or emacs-devel@gnu.org.
+ All patches and related discussion should be sent to the
+ emacs-pretest-bug mailinglist.
+
+
+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 Supplemental information for Emacs Developers:
+
+ If you wish to contribute to Emacs on a regular basis then
+ you may be given write access to the CVS repository.
+
+ Discussion about Emacs development takes place on
+ emacs-devel@gnu.org.
+
+ Think carefully about whether your change requires updating the
+ documentation. If it does, you can either do this yourself or
+ add an item to the NEWS file.
+
+ The best way to understand Emacs Internals is to read the code
+ but there is also a node "GNU Emacs Internals" in the Appendix
+ of the Emacs Lisp Reference Manual that may help.
+
+ The file DEBUG describes how to debug Emacs.
+
+ Avoid using `defadvice' or `eval-after-load' for lisp
+ code to be included in Emacs.