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                        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://www.gnu.org/software/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.

        Submissions which do not conform to the standards will be

        returned with a request to reformat the changes.

        GDB has certain additional coding requirements.  Those

        requirements are explained in the GDB internals documentation

        in the gdb/doc directory.

        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

        (either via the GDB mailing list or the GDB maintainer that is

        taking care of your contributions) 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       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 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 gdb-patches@sourceware.org. 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.ac'' is modified then you don't

        need to include patches to the regenerated file

        ``configure''.

        The maintainer will re-generate those files

        using autoconf (2.64 as of 2009-08-22).

o       If ``gdb/gdbarch.sh'' is modified, you don't

        need to include patches to the generated files

        ``gdbarch.h'' and ``gdbarch.c''.

        See ``gdb/configure.ac'' above.

o       When submitting a patch that fixes a bug

        in GDB's bug database a brief reference

        to the bug can be included in the ChangeLog

        vis

        * CONTRIBUTE: Mention PR convention.

        Fix PR gdb/4705.

        The text ``PR gdb/4705'' should also be included

        in the CVS commit message.  That causes the

        patch to automatically be archived with the PR.