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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version, your patch may be outdated when you write it, and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.
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