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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).