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 git repository, use
	"git diff", remembering first to update to the current master;
	else, use "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@sourceware.org. All
	patches and related discussion should be sent to the
	gdb-patches mailinglist. For further information on the GDB
	git repository, see the Anonymous read-only git access and
	Read-write git 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.ac'' is modified then you don't
	need to include patches to the regenerated file
	``configure''.

	The maintainer will re-generate those files
	using autoconf (2.64 as of 2009-08-22).


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.ac'' 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 git commit message.  That causes the
	patch to automatically be archived with the PR.