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://www.gnu.org/software/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. Submissions which do not conform to the standards will be returned with a request to reformat the changes. GDB has certain additional coding requirements. Those requirements are explained in the GDB internals documentation in the gdb/doc directory. Ref: http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards_toc.html o Copyright Assignment Before we can accept code contributions from you, we need a copyright assignment form filled out and filed with the FSF. See some documentation by the FSF for details and contact us (either via the GDB mailing list or the GDB maintainer that is taking care of your contributions) to obtain the relevant forms. Small changes can be accepted without a copyright assignment form on file. Ref: http://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain.html#SEC6 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 use "cvs update; cvs diff -cp"; else, use "diff -cp 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@sources.redhat.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). o If ``gdb/gdbarch.sh'' is modified, you don't need to include patches to the generated files ``gdbarch.h'' and ``gdbarch.c''. See ``gdb/configure.in'' above. o When submitting a patch that fixes a bug in GDB's bug database a brief reference to the bug can be included in the ChangeLog vis * CONTRIBUTE: Mention PR convention. Fix PR gdb/4705. The text ``PR gdb/4705'' should also be included in the CVS commit message. That causes the patch to automatically be archived with the PR.