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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://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).