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Contributing to FreeBSD - $FreeBSD$ + $FreeBSD: doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/contributing/article.sgml,v 1.469 2001/10/08 06:18:45 murray Exp $ This article describes the different ways in which an individual or organization may contribute to the FreeBSD Project. Jordan Hubbard Contributed by contributing So you want to contribute something to FreeBSD? That is great! We can always use the help, and FreeBSD is one of those systems that relies on the contributions of its user base in order to survive. Your contributions are not only appreciated, they are vital to FreeBSD's continued growth! Contrary to what some people might also have you believe, you do not need to be a hot-shot programmer or a close personal friend of the FreeBSD core team in order to have your contributions accepted. The FreeBSD Project's development is done by a large and growing number of international contributors whose ages and areas of technical expertise vary greatly, and there is always more work to be done than there are people available to do it. Since the FreeBSD project is responsible for an entire operating system environment (and its installation) rather than just a kernel or a few scattered utilities, our TODO list also spans a very wide range of tasks, from documentation, beta testing and presentation to highly specialized types of kernel development. No matter what your skill level, there is almost certainly something you can do to help the project! Commercial entities engaged in FreeBSD-related enterprises are also encouraged to contact us. Need a special extension to make your product work? You will find us receptive to your requests, given that they are not too outlandish. Working on a value-added product? Please let us know! We may be able to work cooperatively on some aspect of it. The free software world is challenging a lot of existing assumptions about how software is developed, sold, and maintained throughout its life cycle, and we urge you to at least give it a second look. What Is Needed The following list of tasks and sub-projects represents something of an amalgam of the various core team TODO lists and user requests we have collected over the last couple of months. Where possible, tasks have been ranked by degree of urgency. If you are interested in working on one of the tasks you see here, send mail to the coordinator listed by clicking on their names. If no coordinator has been appointed, maybe you would like to volunteer? Ongoing Tasks Most of the tasks listed in the previous sections require either a considerable investment of time or an in-depth knowledge of the FreeBSD kernel (or both). However, there are also many useful tasks which are suitable for "weekend hackers", or people without programming skills. If you run FreeBSD-current and have a good Internet connection, there is a machine current.FreeBSD.org which builds a full release once a day — every now and again, try and install the latest release from it and report any failures in the process. Read the freebsd-bugs mailing list. There might be a problem you can comment constructively on or with patches you can test. Or you could even try to fix one of the problems yourself. Read through the FAQ and Handbook periodically. If anything is badly explained, out of date or even just completely wrong, let us know. Even better, send us a fix (SGML is not difficult to learn, but there is no objection to ASCII submissions). Help translate FreeBSD documentation into your native language (if not already available) — just send an email to &a.doc; asking if anyone is working on it. Note that you are not committing yourself to translating every single FreeBSD document by doing this — in fact, the documentation most in need of translation is the installation instructions. Read the freebsd-questions mailing list and &ng.misc occasionally (or even regularly). It can be very satisfying to share your expertise and help people solve their problems; sometimes you may even learn something new yourself! These forums can also be a source of ideas for things to work on. If you know of any bug fixes which have been successfully applied to -current but have not been merged into -stable after a decent interval (normally a couple of weeks), send the committer a polite reminder. Move contributed software to src/contrib in the source tree. Make sure code in src/contrib is up to date. Build the source tree (or just part of it) with extra warnings enabled and clean up the warnings. - Fix warnings for ports which do deprecated things like using - gets() or including malloc.h. + Fix warnings for ports which do deprecated things like + using gets() or including + malloc.h. If you have contributed any ports, send your patches back to the original author (this will make your life easier when they bring out the next version) Suggest further tasks for this list! Work through the PR Database problem reports database The FreeBSD PR list shows all the current active problem reports and requests for enhancement that have been submitted by FreeBSD users. Look through the open PRs, and see if anything there takes your interest. Some of these might be very simple tasks, that just need an extra pair of eyes to look over them and confirm that the fix in the PR is a good one. Others might be much more complex. Start with the PRs that have not been assigned to anyone else, but if one them is assigned to someone else, but it looks like something you can handle, email the person it is assigned to and ask if you can work on it—they might already have a patch ready to be tested, or further ideas that you can discuss with them. How to Contribute Contributions to the system generally fall into one or more of the following 6 categories: Bug Reports and General Commentary An idea or suggestion of general technical interest should be mailed to the &a.hackers;. Likewise, people with an interest in such things (and a tolerance for a high volume of mail!) may subscribe to the hackers mailing list by sending mail to &a.majordomo;. See The FreeBSD Handbook for more information about this and other mailing lists. If you find a bug or are submitting a specific change, please report it using the &man.send-pr.1; program or its WEB-based equivalent. Try to fill-in each field of the bug report. Unless they exceed 65KB, include any patches directly in the report. If the patch is suitable to be applied to the source tree put [PATCH] in the synopsis of the report. When including patches, do not use cut-and-paste because cut-and-paste turns tabs into spaces and makes them unusable. Consider compressing patches and using &man.uuencode.1; if they exceed 20KB. Upload very large submissions to ftp.FreeBSD.org:/pub/FreeBSD/incoming/. After filing a report, you should receive confirmation along with a tracking number. Keep this tracking number so that you can update us with details about the problem by sending mail to bug-followup@FreeBSD.org. Use the number as the message subject, e.g. "Re: kern/3377". Additional information for any bug report should be submitted this way. If you do not receive confirmation in a timely fashion (3 days to a week, depending on your email connection) or are, for some reason, unable to use the &man.send-pr.1; command, then you may ask someone to file it for you by sending mail to the &a.bugs;. Changes to the Documentation documentation submissions Changes to the documentation are overseen by the &a.doc;. Send submissions and changes (even small ones are welcome!) using send-pr as described in Bug Reports and General Commentary. Changes to Existing Source Code FreeBSD-current An addition or change to the existing source code is a somewhat trickier affair and depends a lot on how far out of date you are with the current state of the core FreeBSD development. There is a special on-going release of FreeBSD known as FreeBSD-current which is made available in a variety of ways for the convenience of developers working actively on the system. See The FreeBSD Handbook for more information about getting and using FreeBSD-current. Working from older sources unfortunately means that your changes may sometimes be too obsolete or too divergent for easy re-integration into FreeBSD. Chances of this can be minimized somewhat by subscribing to the &a.announce; and the &a.current; lists, where discussions on the current state of the system take place. Assuming that you can manage to secure fairly up-to-date sources to base your changes on, the next step is to produce a set of diffs to send to the FreeBSD maintainers. This is done with the &man.diff.1; command, with the context diff form being preferred. For example: diff &prompt.user; diff -c oldfile newfile or &prompt.user; diff -c -r olddir newdir would generate such a set of context diffs for the given source file or directory hierarchy. See the man page for &man.diff.1; for more details. Once you have a set of diffs (which you may test with the &man.patch.1; command), you should submit them for inclusion with FreeBSD. Use the &man.send-pr.1; program as described in Bug Reports and General Commentary. Do not just send the diffs to the &a.hackers; or they will get lost! We greatly appreciate your submission (this is a volunteer project!); because we are busy, we may not be able to address it immediately, but it will remain in the PR database until we do. Indicate your submission by including [PATCH] in the synopsis of the report. uuencode If you feel it appropriate (e.g. you have added, deleted, or renamed files), bundle your changes into a tar file and run the &man.uuencode.1; program on it. Shar archives are also welcome. If your change is of a potentially sensitive nature, e.g. you are unsure of copyright issues governing its further distribution or you are simply not ready to release it without a tighter review first, then you should send it to &a.core; directly rather than submitting it with &man.send-pr.1;. The core mailing list reaches a much smaller group of people who do much of the day-to-day work on FreeBSD. Note that this group is also very busy and so you should only send mail to them where it is truly necessary. Please refer to &man.intro.9; and &man.style.9; style for some information on coding style. We would appreciate it if you were at least aware of this information before submitting code. New Code or Major Value-Added Packages In the case of a significant contribution of a large body work, or the addition of an important new feature to FreeBSD, it becomes almost always necessary to either send changes as uuencoded tar files or upload them to a web or FTP site for other people to access. If you do not have access to a web or FTP site, ask on an appropriate FreeBSD mailing list for someone to host the changes for you. When working with large amounts of code, the touchy subject of copyrights also invariably comes up. Acceptable copyrights for code included in FreeBSD are: BSD copyright The BSD copyright. This copyright is most preferred due to its no strings attached nature and general attractiveness to commercial enterprises. Far from discouraging such commercial use, the FreeBSD Project actively encourages such participation by commercial interests who might eventually be inclined to invest something of their own into FreeBSD. GPLGNU General Public License GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License, or GPL. This license is not quite as popular with us due to the amount of extra effort demanded of anyone using the code for commercial purposes, but given the sheer quantity of GPL'd code we currently require (compiler, assembler, text formatter, etc) it would be silly to refuse additional contributions under this license. Code under the GPL also goes into a different part of the tree, that being /sys/gnu or /usr/src/gnu, and is therefore easily identifiable to anyone for whom the GPL presents a problem. Contributions coming under any other type of copyright must be carefully reviewed before their inclusion into FreeBSD will be considered. Contributions for which particularly restrictive commercial copyrights apply are generally rejected, though the authors are always encouraged to make such changes available through their own channels. To place a BSD-style copyright on your work, include the following text at the very beginning of every source code file you wish to protect, replacing the text between the %% with the appropriate information. Copyright (c) %%proper_years_here%% %%your_name_here%%, %%your_state%% %%your_zip%%. All rights reserved. Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met: 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer as the first lines of this file unmodified. 2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution. THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY %%your_name_here%% ``AS IS'' AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL %%your_name_here%% BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE. $Id$ For your convenience, a copy of this text can be found in /usr/share/examples/etc/bsd-style-copyright. Money, Hardware or Internet Access We are always very happy to accept donations to further the cause of the FreeBSD Project and, in a volunteer effort like ours, a little can go a long way! Donations of hardware are also very important to expanding our list of supported peripherals since we generally lack the funds to buy such items ourselves. <anchor id="donations">Donating Funds The FreeBSD Foundation is a non-profit, tax-exempt foundation established to further the goals of the FreeBSD Project. As a 501(c)3 entity, the Foundation is generally exempt from US federal income tax as well as Colorado State income tax. Donations to a tax-exempt entity are often deductible from taxable federal income. Donations may be sent in check form to:
The FreeBSD Foundation 7321 Brockway Dr. Boulder, CO 80303 USA
The Foundation is not yet able to accept other forms of payment such as credit cards and PayPal. More information about the FreeBSD Foundation can be found in The FreeBSD Foundation -- an Introduction. To contact the Foundation by email, write to bod@FreeBSDFoundation.org. Donating Hardware donations Donations of hardware in any of the 3 following categories are also gladly accepted by the FreeBSD Project: General purpose hardware such as disk drives, memory or complete systems should be sent to the FreeBSD, Inc. address listed in the donating funds section. Hardware for which ongoing compliance testing is desired. We are currently trying to put together a testing lab of all components that FreeBSD supports so that proper regression testing can be done with each new release. We are still lacking many important pieces (network cards, motherboards, etc) and if you would like to make such a donation, please contact &a.dg; for information on which items are still required. Hardware currently unsupported by FreeBSD for which you would like to see such support added. Please contact the &a.core; before sending such items as we will need to find a developer willing to take on the task before we can accept delivery of new hardware. Donating Internet Access We can always use new mirror sites for FTP, WWW or cvsup. If you would like to be such a mirror, please contact the FreeBSD project administrators hubs@FreeBSD.org for more information.