Copyright (C) 2006-2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc. See end for license conditions. 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: * Coding Standards Contributed code should follow the GNU Coding Standards. 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/ Ref: GNU Coding Standards Info Manual Ref: The "Tips" Appendix in the Emacs Lisp Reference. * Copyright Assignment We can accept small changes (roughly, fewer than 15 lines) without legal papers. Anything more substantial requires a copyright disclaimer or assignment (the latter is preferred, especially for larger changes). Both of these involved filling out a short form and filing it with the FSF. The process is straightforward -- contact us at emacs-devel@gnu.org to obtain the relevant forms. * Getting the Source Code The latest version of Emacs can be downloaded using Bazaar from the Savannah web site. It is important to write your patch based on the latest version. If you start from an older version, your patch may be outdated (so that maintainers will have a hard time applying it), or changes in Emacs may have made your patch unnecessary. After you have downloaded the Bazaar source, you should read the file INSTALL.BZR for build instructions (they differ to some extent from a normal build). Ref: http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/emacs * Submitting Patches Every patch must have several pieces of information before we can properly evaluate it. When you have all these pieces, bundle them up in a mail message and send it to bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org or emacs-devel@gnu.org. All subsequent discussion should be sent to the same mailing list. ** Description 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. ** ChangeLog 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. Please use "Context Diff" format. If you are accessing the Bazaar repository, make sure your copy is up-to-date (e.g. with `bzr pull'), then use bzr diff --no-aliases --diff-options=-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. ** Mail format. We prefer to get the patches as inline plain text. Please be aware of line wrapping which will make the patch unreadable and useless for us. To avoid that, you can use MIME attachments or, as a last resort, uuencoded gzipped text. ** Please reread your patch before submitting it. ** Do not mix changes. If you send several unrelated changes together, we will ask you to separate them so we can consider each of the changes by itself. ** Do not make formatting changes. Making cosmetic formatting changes (indentation, etc) makes it harder to see what you have really changed. * Coding style and conventions. ** Mandatory reading: The "Tips and Conventions" Appendix of the Emacs Lisp Reference. ** Avoid using `defadvice' or `eval-after-load' for Lisp code to be included in Emacs. ** Remove all trailing whitespace in all source and text files. ** Use ?\s instead of ? in Lisp code for a space character. * Supplemental information for Emacs Developers. ** Write access to the Emacs repository. Once you become a frequent contributor to Emacs, we can consider giving you write access to the Bazaar repository. ** Emacs Mailing lists. Discussion about Emacs development takes place on emacs-devel@gnu.org. Bug reports and feature requests are sent to bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org. You can subscribe to the mailing lists at savannah.gnu.org/projects/emacs. You can find the mailing lists archives at lists.gnu.org or gmane.org. ** Document your changes. 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.) ** Understanding Emacs Internals. 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. This file is part of GNU Emacs. GNU Emacs is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. GNU Emacs is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with GNU Emacs. If not, see . 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