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.