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-<!--
- The FreeBSD Documentation Project
-
- $FreeBSD: doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/contrib/chapter.sgml,v 1.467 2001/08/10 22:58:11 chern Exp $
--->
-
-<chapter id="contrib">
- <chapterinfo>
- <authorgroup>
- <author>
- <firstname>Jordan</firstname>
- <surname>Hubbard</surname>
- <contrib>Contributed by </contrib>
- </author>
- </authorgroup>
- </chapterinfo>
-
- <title>Contributing to FreeBSD</title>
-
- <indexterm><primary>contributing</primary></indexterm>
- <para>So you want to contribute something to FreeBSD? That is great! We can
- always use the help, and FreeBSD is one of those systems that
- <emphasis>relies</emphasis> on the contributions of its user base in order
- to survive. Your contributions are not only appreciated, they are vital
- to FreeBSD's continued growth!</para>
-
- <para>Contrary to what some people might also have you believe, you do not
- need to be a hot-shot programmer or a close personal friend of the FreeBSD
- core team in order to have your contributions accepted. The FreeBSD
- Project's development is done by a large and growing number of
- international contributors whose ages and areas of technical expertise
- vary greatly, and there is always more work to be done than there are
- people available to do it.</para>
-
- <para>Since the FreeBSD project is responsible for an entire operating
- system environment (and its installation) rather than just a kernel or a
- few scattered utilities, our <filename>TODO</filename> list also spans a
- very wide range of tasks, from documentation, beta testing and
- presentation to highly specialized types of kernel development. No matter
- what your skill level, there is almost certainly something you can do to
- help the project!</para>
-
- <para>Commercial entities engaged in FreeBSD-related enterprises are also
- encouraged to contact us. Need a special extension to make your product
- work? You will find us receptive to your requests, given that they are not
- too outlandish. Working on a value-added product? Please let us know! We
- may be able to work cooperatively on some aspect of it. The free software
- world is challenging a lot of existing assumptions about how software is
- developed, sold, and maintained throughout its life cycle, and we urge you
- to at least give it a second look.</para>
-
- <sect1 id="contrib-what">
- <title>What Is Needed</title>
-
- <para>The following list of tasks and sub-projects represents something of
- an amalgam of the various core team <filename>TODO</filename> lists and
- user requests we have collected over the last couple of months. Where
- possible, tasks have been ranked by degree of urgency. If you are
- interested in working on one of the tasks you see here, send mail to the
- coordinator listed by clicking on their names. If no coordinator has
- been appointed, maybe you would like to volunteer?</para>
-
- <sect2>
- <title>Ongoing Tasks</title>
-
- <para>Most of the tasks listed in the previous sections require either a
- considerable investment of time or an in-depth knowledge of the
- FreeBSD kernel (or both). However, there are also many useful tasks
- which are suitable for &quot;weekend hackers&quot;, or people without
- programming skills.</para>
-
- <orderedlist>
- <listitem>
- <para>If you run FreeBSD-current and have a good Internet
- connection, there is a machine <hostid
- role="fqdn">current.FreeBSD.org</hostid> which builds a full
- release once a day &mdash; every now and again, try and install
- the latest release from it and report any failures in the
- process.</para>
- </listitem>
-
- <listitem>
- <para>Read the freebsd-bugs mailing list. There might be a
- problem you can comment constructively on or with patches you
- can test. Or you could even try to fix one of the problems
- yourself.</para>
- </listitem>
-
- <listitem>
- <para>Read through the FAQ and Handbook periodically. If anything
- is badly explained, out of date or even just completely wrong, let
- us know. Even better, send us a fix (SGML is not difficult to
- learn, but there is no objection to ASCII submissions).</para>
- </listitem>
-
- <listitem>
- <para>Help translate FreeBSD documentation into your native language
- (if not already available) &mdash; just send an email to &a.doc;
- asking if anyone is working on it. Note that you are not
- committing yourself to translating every single FreeBSD document
- by doing this &mdash; in fact, the documentation most in need of
- translation is the installation instructions.</para>
- </listitem>
-
- <listitem>
- <para>Read the freebsd-questions mailing list and &ng.misc
- occasionally (or even regularly). It can be very satisfying to
- share your expertise and help people solve their problems;
- sometimes you may even learn something new yourself! These forums
- can also be a source of ideas for things to work on.</para>
- </listitem>
-
- <listitem>
- <para>If you know of any bug fixes which have been successfully
- applied to -current but have not been merged into -stable after a
- decent interval (normally a couple of weeks), send the committer a
- polite reminder.</para>
- </listitem>
-
- <listitem>
- <para>Move contributed software to <filename>src/contrib</filename>
- in the source tree.</para>
- </listitem>
-
- <listitem>
- <para>Make sure code in <filename>src/contrib</filename> is up to
- date.</para>
- </listitem>
-
- <listitem>
- <para>Build the source tree (or just part of it) with extra warnings
- enabled and clean up the warnings.</para>
- </listitem>
-
- <listitem>
- <para>Fix warnings for ports which do deprecated things like using
- gets() or including malloc.h.</para>
- </listitem>
-
- <listitem>
- <para>If you have contributed any ports, send your patches back to
- the original author (this will make your life easier when they
- bring out the next version)</para>
- </listitem>
-
- <listitem>
- <para>Suggest further tasks for this list!</para>
- </listitem>
- </orderedlist>
- </sect2>
-
- <sect2>
- <title>Work through the PR Database</title>
-
- <indexterm><primary>problem reports database</primary></indexterm>
- <para>The <ulink
- url="http://www.FreeBSD.org/cgi/query-pr-summary.cgi">FreeBSD PR
- list</ulink> shows all the current active problem reports and
- requests for enhancement that have been submitted by FreeBSD users.
- Look through the open PRs, and see if anything there takes your
- interest. Some of these might be very simple tasks, that just need an
- extra pair of eyes to look over them and confirm that the fix in the
- PR is a good one. Others might be much more complex.</para>
-
- <para>Start with the PRs that have not been assigned to anyone else, but
- if one them is assigned to someone else, but it looks like something
- you can handle, email the person it is assigned to and ask if you can
- work on it&mdash;they might already have a patch ready to be tested,
- or further ideas that you can discuss with them.</para>
- </sect2>
- </sect1>
-
- <sect1 id="contrib-how">
- <title>How to Contribute</title>
-
- <para>Contributions to the system generally fall into one or more of the
- following 6 categories:</para>
-
- <sect2 id="contrib-general">
- <title>Bug Reports and General Commentary</title>
-
- <para>An idea or suggestion of <emphasis>general</emphasis> technical
- interest should be mailed to the &a.hackers;. Likewise, people with
- an interest in such things (and a tolerance for a
- <emphasis>high</emphasis> volume of mail!) may subscribe to the
- hackers mailing list by sending mail to &a.majordomo;. See <link
- linkend="eresources-mail">mailing lists</link> for more information
- about this and other mailing lists.</para>
-
- <para>If you find a bug or are submitting a specific change, please
- report it using the &man.send-pr.1; program or its <ulink
- url="http://www.FreeBSD.org/send-pr.html">WEB-based
- equivalent</ulink>. Try to fill-in each field of the bug report.
- Unless they exceed 65KB, include any patches directly in the report.
- If the patch is suitable to be applied to the source tree put
- <literal>[PATCH]</literal> in the synopsis of the report.
- When including patches, <emphasis>do not</emphasis> use cut-and-paste
- because cut-and-paste turns tabs into spaces and makes them unusable.
- Consider compressing patches and using &man.uuencode.1; if they exceed
- 20KB. Upload very large submissions to <ulink
- url="ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/incoming/">ftp.FreeBSD.org:/pub/FreeBSD/incoming/</ulink>.</para>
-
- <para>After filing a report, you should receive confirmation along with
- a tracking number. Keep this tracking number so that you can update
- us with details about the problem by sending mail to
- <email>bug-followup@FreeBSD.org</email>. Use the number as the
- message subject, e.g. <literal>"Re: kern/3377"</literal>. Additional
- information for any bug report should be submitted this way.</para>
-
- <para>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 &man.send-pr.1; command, then you may ask
- someone to file it for you by sending mail to the &a.bugs;.</para>
- </sect2>
-
- <sect2>
- <title>Changes to the Documentation</title>
-
- <indexterm><primary>documentation submissions</primary></indexterm>
- <para>Changes to the documentation are overseen by the &a.doc;. Send
- submissions and changes (even small ones are welcome!) using
- <command>send-pr</command> as described in <link
- linkend="contrib-general">Bug Reports and General
- Commentary</link>.</para>
- </sect2>
-
- <sect2>
- <title>Changes to Existing Source Code</title>
-
- <indexterm><primary>FreeBSD-current</primary></indexterm>
- <para>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 <quote>FreeBSD-current</quote>
- which is made available in a variety of ways for the convenience of
- developers working actively on the system. See <link
- linkend="current">Staying current with FreeBSD</link> for more
- information about getting and using FreeBSD-current.</para>
-
- <para>Working from older sources unfortunately means that your changes
- may sometimes be too obsolete or too divergent for easy re-integration
- into FreeBSD. Chances of this can be minimized somewhat by
- subscribing to the &a.announce; and the &a.current; lists, where
- discussions on the current state of the system take place.</para>
-
- <para>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. This is done with the &man.diff.1;
- command, with the <quote>context diff</quote> form
- being preferred. For example:</para>
-
- <indexterm>
- <primary><command>diff</command></primary>
- </indexterm>
- <para>
- <screen>&prompt.user; <userinput>diff -c oldfile newfile</userinput></screen>
-
- or
-
- <screen>&prompt.user; <userinput>diff -c -r olddir newdir</userinput></screen>
-
- would generate such a set of context diffs for the given source file
- or directory hierarchy. See the man page for &man.diff.1; for more
- details.</para>
-
- <para>Once you have a set of diffs (which you may test with the
- &man.patch.1; command), you should submit them for inclusion with
- FreeBSD. Use the &man.send-pr.1; program as described in <link
- linkend="contrib-general">Bug Reports and General Commentary</link>.
- <emphasis>Do not</emphasis> just send the diffs to the &a.hackers; or
- they will get lost! We greatly appreciate your submission (this is a
- volunteer project!); because we are busy, we may not be able to
- address it immediately, but it will remain in the PR database until we
- do. Indicate your submission by including <literal>[PATCH]</literal>
- in the synopsis of the report.</para>
-
- <indexterm>
- <primary><command>uuencode</command></primary>
- </indexterm>
- <para>If you feel it appropriate (e.g. you have added, deleted, or
- renamed files), bundle your changes into a <command>tar</command> file
- and run the &man.uuencode.1; program on it. Shar archives are also
- welcome.</para>
-
- <para>If your change is of a potentially sensitive nature, e.g. you are
- unsure of copyright issues governing its further distribution or you
- are simply not ready to release it without a tighter review first,
- then you should send it to &a.core; directly rather than submitting it
- with &man.send-pr.1;. 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 <emphasis>very busy</emphasis> and so you
- should only send mail to them where it is truly necessary.</para>
-
- <para>Please refer to &man.intro.9; and &man.style.9; style for
- some information on coding style. We would appreciate it if you
- were at least aware of this information before submitting
- code.</para>
- </sect2>
-
- <sect2>
- <title>New Code or Major Value-Added Packages</title>
-
- <para>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 or upload them to a web or FTP site for other people to
- access. If you do not have access to a web or FTP site, ask on an
- appropriate FreeBSD mailing list for someone to host the changes for
- you.</para>
-
- <para>When working with large amounts of code, the touchy subject of
- copyrights also invariably comes up. Acceptable copyrights for code
- included in FreeBSD are:</para>
-
- <orderedlist>
- <indexterm><primary>BSD copyright</primary></indexterm>
- <listitem>
- <para>The BSD copyright. This copyright is most preferred due to
- its <quote>no strings attached</quote> nature and general
- attractiveness to commercial enterprises. Far from discouraging
- such commercial use, the FreeBSD Project actively encourages such
- participation by commercial interests who might eventually be
- inclined to invest something of their own into FreeBSD.</para>
- </listitem>
-
- <indexterm><primary>GPL</primary><see>GNU General Public License</see></indexterm>
- <indexterm><primary>GNU General Public License</primary></indexterm>
- <listitem>
- <para>The GNU General Public License, or <quote>GPL</quote>.
- This license is not quite as popular with us due to the amount
- of extra effort demanded of anyone using the code for
- commercial purposes, but given the sheer quantity of GPL'd code
- we currently require (compiler, assembler, text formatter, etc)
- it would be silly to refuse additional contributions under this
- license. Code under the GPL also goes into a different part of
- the tree, that being <filename>/sys/gnu</filename> or
- <filename>/usr/src/gnu</filename>, and is therefore easily
- identifiable to anyone for whom the GPL presents a
- problem.</para>
- </listitem>
- </orderedlist>
-
- <para>Contributions coming under any other type of copyright must be
- carefully reviewed before their inclusion into FreeBSD will be
- considered. Contributions for which particularly restrictive
- commercial copyrights apply are generally rejected, though the authors
- are always encouraged to make such changes available through their own
- channels.</para>
-
- <para>To place a <quote>BSD-style</quote> copyright on your work, include
- the following text at the very beginning of every source code file you
- wish to protect, replacing the text between the <literal>%%</literal>
- with the appropriate information.</para>
-
- <programlisting>Copyright (c) %%proper_years_here%%
- %%your_name_here%%, %%your_state%% %%your_zip%%.
- All rights reserved.
-
-Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
-modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions
-are met:
-1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
- notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer as
- the first lines of this file unmodified.
-2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
- notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
- documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
-
-THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY %%your_name_here%% ``AS IS'' AND ANY EXPRESS OR
-IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES
-OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED.
-IN NO EVENT SHALL %%your_name_here%% BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT,
-INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT
-NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE,
-DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY
-THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT
-(INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF
-THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.
-
- &#36;Id&#36;</programlisting>
-
- <para>For your convenience, a copy of this text can be found in
- <filename>/usr/share/examples/etc/bsd-style-copyright</filename>.</para>
- </sect2>
-
- <sect2>
- <title>Money, Hardware or Internet Access</title>
-
- <para>We are always very happy to accept donations to further the cause
- of the FreeBSD Project and, in a volunteer effort like ours, a little
- can go a long way! Donations of hardware are also very important to
- expanding our list of supported peripherals since we generally lack
- the funds to buy such items ourselves.</para>
-
- <sect3>
- <title><anchor id="donations">Donating Funds</title>
-
- <para>The FreeBSD Foundation is a non-profit, tax-exempt
- foundation established to further the goals of the FreeBSD
- Project. As a 501(c)3 entity, the Foundation is generally
- exempt from US federal income tax as well as Colorado
- State income tax. Donations to a tax-exempt entity are
- often deductible from taxable federal income.</para>
-
- <para>Donations may be sent in check form to:
- <address>
- The FreeBSD Foundation
- <street>7321 Brockway Dr.</street>
- <city>Boulder</city>, <state>CO</state> <postcode>80303</postcode>
- <country>USA</country>
- </address>
- The Foundation is not yet able to accept other forms
- of payment such as credit cards and PayPal.</para>
-
- <para>More information about the FreeBSD Foundation can be
- found in <ulink
- url="http://people.freebsd.org/~jdp/foundation/announcement.html">The
- FreeBSD Foundation -- an Introduction</ulink>. To contact
- the Foundation by email, write to
- <email>bod@FreeBSDFoundation.org</email>.</para>
- </sect3>
-
- <sect3>
- <title>Donating Hardware</title>
- <indexterm><primary>donations</primary></indexterm>
-
- <para>Donations of hardware in any of the 3 following categories are
- also gladly accepted by the FreeBSD Project:</para>
-
- <itemizedlist>
- <listitem>
- <para>General purpose hardware such as disk drives, memory or
- complete systems should be sent to the FreeBSD, Inc. address
- listed in the <emphasis>donating funds</emphasis>
- section.</para>
- </listitem>
-
- <listitem>
- <para>Hardware for which ongoing compliance testing is desired.
- We are currently trying to put together a testing lab of all
- components that FreeBSD supports so that proper regression
- testing can be done with each new release. We are still lacking
- many important pieces (network cards, motherboards, etc) and if
- you would like to make such a donation, please contact &a.dg;
- for information on which items are still required.</para>
- </listitem>
-
- <listitem>
- <para>Hardware currently unsupported by FreeBSD for which you
- would like to see such support added. Please contact the
- &a.core; before sending such items as we will need to find a
- developer willing to take on the task before we can accept
- delivery of new hardware.</para>
- </listitem>
- </itemizedlist>
- </sect3>
-
- <sect3>
- <title>Donating Internet Access</title>
-
- <para>We can always use new mirror sites for FTP, WWW or
- <command>cvsup</command>. If you would like to be such a mirror,
- please contact the FreeBSD project administrators
- <email>hubs@FreeBSD.org</email> for more information.</para>
- </sect3>
- </sect2>
- </sect1>
-
-</chapter>
-
-<!--
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- sgml-indent-data: t
- sgml-omittag: nil
- sgml-always-quote-attributes: t
- sgml-parent-document: ("../book.sgml" "part" "chapter")
- End:
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