Contributing to GNU Radio
Maintainership
GNU Radio is currently maintained by:
Coding Standards
All contributions should conform to the GNU Coding Standards as modified for C++ in README.hacking
Copyright Assignment
Before we can accept non-trivial code contributions from you, we need a copyright assignment on file with the FSF. A description of the process is available here. This boils down to the following instructions:
- If you've developed some addition or patch to GNU Radio that you would like to contribute, you should send mail to the patch-gnuradio@gnu.org list, or to one of the GNU Radio maintainers asking for an appropriate form. We might ask you for some more information at this point.
- You will be sent a short form by email which you should fill in and email back to the FSF.
- Once the FSF have received this email, they will send you a paper copy of the full copyright assignment papers for you to sign and post back to them.
- As soon as the signed paperwork is filed at the FSF we can accept your changes into the soure tree.
- Individual small changes (fewer than 10 lines of code) can, however, be accepted without a copyright assignment form on file.
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. For new features a description of the feature and your implementation. Patches which include new test cases are especially welcome.
- A ChangeLog entry as plaintext; see the various
ChangeLog files for format and content.
- The patch itself.
- If your changes add a new feature, please provide documentation as a patch to the texinfo docs.
Submit your patch by sending it to the patch-gnuradio@gnu.org mailing list.
When you have submitted your patch, somebody will tell you what to do next. If the patch is small, just send it directly to the list. Be sure to send the patch as a mime text attachment, or pasted directly into the mail. Uuencoded patches, or patches otherwise rendered unreadable by peculiar mime encoding make it much harder for the gnuradio developers to read and/or apply your patch. If your patch is very large (more than a hundred kilobytes), try to upload the patch itself to savannah and post only a link to the mailing list.
Persistent contributors who submit high quality patches may be given direct subversion access.
Submitting Bug Reports
There is a special list for reporting bugs, bug-gnuradio@gnu.org, to enable the developers to track submitted bug reports. If you think you have found a bug in gnuradio, please send as complete a report as possible to this list. Ideally, you should include the text you get by running config.guess, the text you see when you run configure, and if you can, a patch made with diff -u5 which fixes the problem. If you can send a small script which fails with the unpatched distribution, but passes with your patch applied we can add the test to the distribution to make sure the bug doesn't reappear.