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How to Submit Patches

Cafu is to a community project and we need and very much appreciate your help. Your contributions and especially patches are very important for Cafu. Patches help us to add new features, improve code quality and fix bugs, so we are happy and grateful if you contribute them. :-D

Changing Cafu

Please read the Coding Conventions and try to conform to them. In particular, please respect the indentation rules (4 spaces, no TABs) – patches are really difficult to read otherwise.

Provide documentation

Bug fixes and elegant program solutions often involve complex code that can be difficult to understand without documentation, and an undocumented new feature is hardly useful to anyone but its author.

Therefore, please provide any required documentation such as source code comments (preferably in familiar and simple Doxygen format), high-level overviews, diagrams, etc. Without documentation, another developer would have to write it, and the patch cannot be applied until he has time to do it.

Make atomic patches

A patch should be self-contained – one patch for one thing.

Do not combine multiple new features in a single patch: A patch that adds bitmaps to menu items and fixes a bug in the network code is a bad patch. It should be splitted into two patches.

On the other hand, do not split a single code change into multiple patches: Two patches, one of them being “implementation of new member-functions”, the other “changes in class documentation to accommodate new members” are two bad patches. They are related to one, logically indivisible thing, so they should be in one common patch.

Final Considerations

  1. On Dive-In, we need “How to contribute” / “Fork me on Bitbucket”.
  2. Why Your Project Doesn't Need a Contributor Licensing Agreement, http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2014/06/09/do-not-need-cla.html
cppdev/submitpatches.txt · Last modified: 2017-02-05 13:37 by Carsten