Xenomai:Contributing Patches
From Xenomai
Contributions are always welcome, specifically when they fix bugs or enhance the feature set of Xenomai. This page roughly sketches the way to generate and post your modifications so that they can be merged into mainline Xenomai.
[edit] Working against SVN
This is the preferred base to develop your patches against. Either use SVN head or the related maintenance branch.
- Check out the latest SVN revision. See SVN page at our project hoster Gna! for more details on this procedure.
- Modify the code.
- Try to adopt the coding style you find in the files you touch. Normally, it's kernel coding style, except for a few (yet unconverted) parts of Xenomai.
- Test your code! Even if the change is trivial, typos can easily cause rainy days...
- If you add new files or directories, run svn add on them now. This will only teach them to your local SVN repository so that the following step includes them.
- Run svn diff in the top Xenomai directory, save the output as the patch (svn diff > my-xenomai.patch). In order to make that patch more readable for reviewers, it is preferred that they are generated in a specific format (diff -up). See Teaching -p to svn diff on how to configure your environment.
- Post the patch for review to the core mailing list. This may happen inlined (only if your mail client does not mangle tabs or spaces and does not wrap long lines!) or as a plain-text attachment.
In case you have to handle a series of patches, changing different parts of Xenomai or creating a stack of incremental changes, you may want to have a look at quilt. It also comes with most distributions.
If your patch is fine, it will be picked up by some core team member and will be merged. In case some critisism remains, you will get a reply what should be done differently.
[edit] Working against a release
- todo
