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authorjkh <jkh@FreeBSD.org>1995-03-02 12:28:04 +0000
committerjkh <jkh@FreeBSD.org>1995-03-02 12:28:04 +0000
commit45316e458f0223cbcb4861ff688ab6a568ffe100 (patch)
tree05b8bae4591903e86cdc5de07481eaaf2fce27e3 /share/FAQ
parent89fc94223f42653f70c5c492dbb69788fdacbe06 (diff)
downloadFreeBSD-src-45316e458f0223cbcb4861ff688ab6a568ffe100.zip
FreeBSD-src-45316e458f0223cbcb4861ff688ab6a568ffe100.tar.gz
My first rough cut at a guide to new submitters. I started out answering
someone's question and ended up writing an entire FAQ - I *hate* that! :-)
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+Thank you for your offer of this driver! It does look like it will be of
+use to our many japanese users. I am appending a copy of my standard
+"how to submit code to FreeBSD" document below. It hopefully explains
+any questions you may have, though please do not hesitate in contacting
+me should you have any further questions.
+
+ Jordan
+
+-- A submitter's guide to FreeBSD --
+
+This guide is intended for those who are moderately familar with FreeBSD
+and are now to the point where they have some locally developed
+customizations or fixes to the system which they'd like to incorporate
+back into the mainstream sources, thus saving the work of having to
+re-integrate the changes for each subsequent FreeBSD release. Submitting
+something to the FreeBSD project is also an excellent way of getting your
+code seriously *tested*! Many people have developed an original concept
+far beyond what they might have envisioned at the start just due to the
+flood of feedback and ideas generated by the many thousands of users of
+FreeBSD. Contributions are also what FreeBSD lives and grows from,
+and so your contributions are very important to the continued survival
+of this communal effort of ours - we're very glad to see you reading this
+documentation! :-)
+
+Submissions to FreeBSD can generally be classified into four catagories:
+
+1. Ideas, general suggestions, bug reports.
+2. Addition, deletion, renaming or patching of existing sources.
+3. Significant contribution of a large body of independant work.
+4. Porting of freely available software.
+
+A submission in *any* of these catagories is highly welcomed as they
+are each, in their own way, quite significant to the project.
+
+
+1. An idea, suggestion or fix can be communicated in one of the following
+ways:
+
+ o An idea or suggestion of general technical interest should be
+ mailed to <hackers@freebsd.org>. Likewise, people with an interest
+ in such things (and a tolerance for a HIGH volume of mail!) may
+ subscribe by sendimg mail to <majordomo@freebsd.org>. See also the
+ file /usr/share/FAQ/mailing-list.FAQ.
+
+ o An actual bug report should be filed by using the send-pr(1)
+ command (``man send-pr'' for information). This will prompt
+ you for various fields to fill in. Simply go to the fields
+ surrounded by <>'s and fill in your own information in place of
+ what's suggested there. You should receive confirmation of your
+ bug report and a tracking number (which you should also reference in
+ any subsequent correspondence).
+
+ 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 send-pr command, then you may also
+ file a bug report (or follow-up to one) by sending mail to:
+
+ <bugs@freebsd.org>
+
+
+2. 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" and made available in a variety of
+ ways (see /usr/share/FAQ/current-policy.FAQ and /usr/share/FAQ/ctm.FAQ) for
+ the convenience of developers who wish to actively work on the system.
+
+ Working from older sources unfortunately means that your changes may
+ sometimes be too obsolute to use, or too divergent to allow for easy
+ re-integration. This can be minimized somewhat by subscribing to the
+ <announce@freebsd.org> mailing list (among others) where periodic
+ announcements concerning the current state of the system are made.
+ If you see a change being proposed for which you have a better solution,
+ then please, by all means come forward with your contribution and we
+ will do our very best to evaluate it fairly and perhaps integrate it if
+ it is indeed a better (or easier :) solution.
+
+ 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 for evaluation and possible adoption. This is done
+ with the diff(1) command, with the FreeBSD maintainers preferring to receive
+ diffs in `context diff' form. See the man page for diff for more details
+ on producing both context and recursive context diffs
+ (diff -c <oldfile> <newfile> or diff -c -r <olddir> <newdir>).
+
+ Once you have a set of diffs that are capable of taking a copy of the
+ original code and bringing it to a state identical to the "new" sources
+ (you may test this with the patch(1) command - see patch man page), you
+ should bundle them up in an email message and send it, along with a brief
+ description of what the diffs are for, to <hackers@freebsd.org>. Someone
+ will very likely get back in touch with you in 24 hours or less, assuming
+ of course that your diffs are interesting! :-)
+
+ If your changes don't express themselves well as diffs alone (e.g. you've
+ perhaps added, deleted or renamed files as well) then you may be better off
+ bundling any new files, diffs and instructions for deleting/renaming any
+ others into a tar file and running the `uuencode' program on it before
+ sending the output of that to <hackers@freebsd.org>. See the man pages
+ on tar and uuencode for more info on bundling files through the mail this
+ way.
+
+ If your change is of a potentially sensitive nature, e.g. you're unsure
+ of copyright issues governing its further distribution, or you're simply
+ not ready to release it without a tighter review first, then you should
+ send it to <core@freebsd.org> rather than <hackers@freebsd.org>. 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 really only mail to them in cases where mailing to hackers
+ truly is impractical.
+
+
+3. 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 (see above)
+ or upload them to our ftp site:
+ ftp://freefall.cdrom.com/pub/FreeBSD/incoming
+
+ Users may log in anonymously and upload their work or download the
+ work-in-progress files left by others.
+
+ When working with large amounts of code, the touchy subject of copyrights
+ also invariably comes up. The view of the FreeBSD project towards
+ acceptable copyrights (for code included in FreeBSD) are:
+
+ 3a. Contributions under the BSD copyright (see the file
+ /usr/share/examples/etc/bsd-style-copyright for a template)
+ is greatly preferred due to its "no strings attached"
+ nature and general attractiveness to commercial enterprises
+ who might then be inclined to invest something of their own
+ into FreeBSD.
+
+ 3b. Contributions under the GNU Public License, or "GPL". This is
+ not quite as popular a solution for us, due to (all religious
+ issues aside) the amount of extra effort demanded of anyone
+ using the code for commercial purposes. However, given the
+ sheer quantity of GPL'd code we currently require (compiler,
+ assembler, text formatter, etc), it would be silly to pretend
+ that we couldn't deal with the GPL at all and so we have become
+ more willing to accept code with either the BSD or the GPL
+ copyright. Code under the GPL also goes into a different part
+ of the tree, that being /sys/gnu or /usr/src/gnu.
+
+ 3c. Contributions coming under any other type of copyright must be
+ carefully reviewed before their inclusion into FreeBSD will even
+ be considered. Contributions for which particularly restrictive
+ commercial copyrights apply are generally rejected, though the
+ authors are always free to make the changes available through
+ their own channels.
+
+
+4. The porting of freely available software, while perhaps not as gratifying
+ as developing your own package from scratch, is still a vital part of
+ FreeBSD's growth and of great usefulness to those who wouldn't otherwise
+ know where to turn for it. All ported software is organized into a
+ hierarchy know as ``the ports collection''. This collection enables
+ a new user to get a complete overview of what's available in a short time,
+ and with a logical (we hope) framework. The ports collection also saves
+ considerable space by not actually containing the the majority of the
+ sources being ported. This can be confusing to the new user and the file
+ /usr/share/FAQ/ports.FAQ goes some way towards explaing how it all works.
+
+ If you have the ports collection on your machine, the file
+ /usr/ports/GUIDELINES also helps to explain the process of creating
+ and contributing a port of your own. For more information on the ports
+ collection (that wasn't available in the FAQ), you may also send mail to
+ <ports@freebsd.org>.
+
+
+Whichever way you decide to contribute, we hope you'll find it an enjoyable
+process and also realize how valuable your contributions are to the project!
+FreeBSD is one of those great projects where the more we all put in, the
+more we all get back out of it again, and with enough steady contributions
+it begins to aquire a momentum of its own. It is through such momentum
+that mountains are moved! :-)
+
+ Jordan
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