Mercurial > emacs
view CONTRIBUTE @ 71663:1c3e611b4833
(Fringe Cursors): Fix typo.
(Customizing Bitmaps): Fix define-fringe-bitmap entry.
(Overlay Arrow): Default is overlay-arrow fringe indicator.
author | Kim F. Storm <storm@cua.dk> |
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date | Fri, 07 Jul 2006 13:31:23 +0000 |
parents | 475dcca89ec9 |
children | a99d8ae1c5d9 |
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Contributing to Emacs Emacs is a collaborative project and we encourage contributions from anyone and everyone. If you want to contribute in the way that will help us most, we recommend (1) fixing reported bugs and (2) implementing the feature ideas in etc/TODO. However, if you think of new features to add, please suggest them too -- we might like your idea. Porting to new platforms is also useful, when there is a new platform, but that is not common nowadays. For documentation on how to develop Emacs changes, refer to the Emacs Manual and the Emacs Lisp Reference Manual (both included in the Emacs distribution). The web pages in http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs contain additional information. You may also want to submit your change so that can be considered for inclusion in a future version of Emacs (see below). If you don't feel up to hacking Emacs, there are many other ways to help. You can answer questions on the mailing lists, write documentation, find and report bugs, contribute to the Emacs web pages, or develop a package that works with Emacs. Here are some style and legal conventions for contributors to Emacs: o Coding Standards Contributed code should follow the GNU Coding Standard. If it doesn't, we'll need to find someone to fix the code before we can use it. Emacs has certain additional style and coding conventions. Ref: http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards_toc.html Ref: GNU Coding Standards Info Manual o Copyright Assignment We can accept small changes without legal papers, and for medium-size changes a copyright disclaimer is ok too. To accept substantial contributions from you, we need a copyright assignment form filled out and filed with the FSF. Contact us at emacs-devel@gnu.org to obtain the relevant forms. o Getting the Source Code The latest version of Emacs can be downloaded using CVS or Arch from the Savannah web site. It is important to write your patch based on this version; if you start from an older version, your patch may be outdated when you write it, and maintainers will have hard time applying it. After you have downloaded the CVS source, you should read the file INSTALL.CVS for build instructions (they differ to some extent from a normal build). Ref: http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/emacs o Submitting Patches Every patch must have several pieces of information before we can properly evaluate it. * For bug fixes, a description of the bug and how your patch fixes this bug. * 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. Texinfo files. Ref: "Change Log Concepts" node of the GNU Coding Standards Info Manual, for how to write good log entries. * The patch itself. If you are accessing the CVS repository use "cvs update; cvs diff -cp"; else, use "diff -cp OLD NEW". If your version of diff does not support these options, then get the latest version of GNU Diff. * We accept the 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 emacs-pretest-bug@gnu.org or emacs-devel@gnu.org. All subsequent discussion should also be sent to the mailing list. o Please reread your patch before submitting it. o If you send several unrelated changes together, we will ask you to separate them so we can consider each of the changes by itself. o Supplemental information for Emacs Developers: Once you become a frequent contributor to Emacs, we can consider giving you write access to the CVS repository. Discussion about Emacs development takes place on emacs-devel@gnu.org. Think carefully about whether your change requires updating the documentation. If it does, you can either do this yourself or add an item to the NEWS file. If you document your change in NEWS, please mark the NEWS entry with the documentation status of the change: if you submit the changes for the manuals, mark it with "+++"; if it doesn't need to be documented, mark it with "---"; if it needs to be documented, but you didn't submit documentation changes, leave the NEWS entry unmarked. (These marks are checked by the Emacs maintainers to make sure every change was reflected in the manuals.) The best way to understand Emacs Internals is to read the code, but the nodes "Tips" and "GNU Emacs Internals" in the Appendix of the Emacs Lisp Reference Manual may also help. The file etc/DEBUG describes how to debug Emacs bugs. Avoid using `defadvice' or `eval-after-load' for Lisp code to be included in Emacs.