Contributed by &a.jkh;.
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:
An idea, suggestion or fix can be communicated in one of the following ways:
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affair and depends a lot on how far out of date you are with the current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 obsolete 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.
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:
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!