Cafu is to a large degree 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.

Remember that if you have any questions about the steps here, you can always post them at the Cafu forum and we'll do our best to help you.

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.

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.

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.

Remember that it is often not easy to understand the purpose of your patch just from its source code. If you provide detailed description of the patch, we will be able to apply it much faster – and we will love you for submitting such nice patches!

1. We need “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
3. https://kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/submitting-patches.html