_ _ ____ _ ___| | | | _ \| | / __| | | | |_) | | | (__| |_| | _ <| |___ \___|\___/|_| \_\_____| To Think About When Contributing Source Code This document is intended to offer some simple guidelines that can be useful to keep in mind when you decide to contribute to the project. This concerns new features as well as corrections to existing flaws or bugs. Join the Community Skip over to http://curl.haxx.se/mail/ and join the appropriate mailing list(s). Read up on details before you post questions. Read this file before you start sending patches! We prefer patches and discussions being held on the mailing list(s), not sent to individuals. The License Issue When contributing with code, you agree to put your changes and new code under the same license curl and libcurl is already using unless stated otherwise. If you add a larger piece of code, you can opt to make that file or set of files to use a different license as long as they don't enforce any changes to the rest of the package and they make sense. Such "separate parts" can not be GPL (as we don't want the GPL virus to attack users of libcurl) but they must use "GPL compatible" licenses. What To Read Source code, the man pages, the INTERNALS document, the TODO, the most recent CHANGES. Just lurking on the libcurl mailing list is gonna give you a lot of insights on what's going on right now. Asking there is a good idea too. Naming Try using a non-confusing naming scheme for your new functions and variable names. It doesn't necessarily have to mean that you should use the same as in other places of the code, just that the names should be logical, understandable and be named according to what they're used for. File-local functions should be made static. We like lower case names. See the INTERNALS document on how we name non-exported library-global symbols. Indenting Please try using the same indenting levels and bracing method as all the other code already does. It makes the source code a lot easier to follow if all of it is written using the same style. We don't ask you to like it, we just ask you to follow the tradition! ;-) This mainly means: 2-level indents, using spaces only (no tabs) and having the opening brace ({) on the same line as the if() or while(). Commenting Comment your source code extensively using C comments (/* comment */), DO NOT use C++ comments (// this style). Commented code is quality code and enables future modifications much more. Uncommented code much more risk being completely replaced when someone wants to extend things, since other persons' source code can get quite hard to read. General Style Keep your functions small. If they're small you avoid a lot of mistakes and you don't accidentally mix up variables etc. Non-clobbering All Over When you write new functionality or fix bugs, it is important that you don't fiddle all over the source files and functions. Remember that it is likely that other people have done changes in the same source files as you have and possibly even in the same functions. If you bring completely new functionality, try writing it in a new source file. If you fix bugs, try to fix one bug at a time and send them as separate patches. Platform Dependent Code Use #ifdef HAVE_FEATURE to do conditional code. We avoid checking for particular operating systems or hardware in the #ifdef lines. The HAVE_FEATURE shall be generated by the configure script for unix-like systems and they are hard-coded in the config-[system].h files for the others. Separate Patches It is annoying when you get a huge patch from someone that is said to fix 511 odd problems, but discussions and opinions don't agree with 510 of them - or 509 of them were already fixed in a different way. Then the patcher needs to extract the single interesting patch from somewhere within the huge pile of source, and that gives a lot of extra work. Preferably, all fixes that correct different problems should be in their own patch with an attached description exactly what they correct so that all patches can be selectively applied by the maintainer or other interested parties. Patch Against Recent Sources Please try to get the latest available sources to make your patches against. It makes the life of the developers so much easier. The very best is if you get the most up-to-date sources from the CVS repository, but the latest release archive is quite OK as well! Document Writing docs is dead boring and one of the big problems with many open source projects. Someone's gotta do it. It makes it a lot easier if you submit a small description of your fix or your new features with every contribution so that it can be swiftly added to the package documentation. The documentation is always made in man pages (nroff formatted) or plain ASCII files. All HTML files on the web site and in the release archives are generated from the nroff/ASCII versions. Write Access to CVS Repository If you are a frequent contributor, or have another good reason, you can of course get write access to the CVS repository and then you'll be able to check-in all your changes straight into the CVS tree instead of sending all changes by mail as patches. Just ask if this is what you'd want. You will be required to have posted a few quality patches first, before you can be granted write access. Test Cases Since the introduction of the test suite, we can quickly verify that the main features are working as they're supposed to. To maintain this situation and improve it, all new features and functions that are added need to be tested in the test suite. Every feature that is added should get at least one valid test case that verifies that it works as documented. If every submitter also post a few test cases, it won't end up as a heavy burden on a single person! How To Make a Patch Keep a copy of the unmodified curl sources. Make your changes in a separate source tree. When you think you have something that you want to offer the curl community, use GNU diff to generate patches. If you have modified a single file, try something like: diff -u undmodified-file.c my-changed-one.c > my-fixes.diff If you have modified several files, possibly in different directories, you can use diff recursively: diff -ur curl-original-dir curl-modfied-sources-dir > my-fixes.diff GNU diff exists for virtually all platforms, including all kinds of unixes and Windows.