Guide for New Contributors

This wiki is aimed at guiding new contributors. Before starting, go through the below mentioned guidelines and steps.

Getting Started

• All communication is done through a single mailing list. Click here to subscribe.

• While posting to the mailing, please make sure that you,
  1. only send text emails—no HTML allowed;
  2. do not top post;
  3. use and abuse the mailing list archive to see how proper discussions are handled;
  4. be patient, a reply may need a week to come by.
• Get the code. You can download the repo using the command

  • git clone https://github.com/strace/strace

  • Or use the alternative repository URL: git clone https://gitlab.com/strace/strace.git

• Build instructions:

  • ./bootstrap
    ./configure
    make -j`nproc`
    make -j`nproc` check
    make install

  • For a detailed explanation, read the INSTALL and README-hacking files.

How to Submit a Patch

• After making all the desired changes to the files, you have to stage the commit (read about git staging area):

  • git add *

  • Or use git add -i for the interactive work with the index.

• Once you have staged the files, commit the changes

  • git commit

  • Provide a commit message in accordance with guidelines outlined in README-hacking.

• Next, create a patch file containing the commit.
  • To create a patch of only a single commit

    • git format-patch -1 <commit> --author= "<Your Name>" --reroll-count=<version number>

  • To create a patch of all the commits after a certain commit (origin/master, for example):

    • git format-patch <commit> --author= "<Your Name>" --reroll-count=<version number>

• You are advised to process the patches through the scripts/checkpatch.pl script from the Linux kernel repository in order to catch common formatting mistakes in advance.

• Your patch file is ready now. The last step is to send it to the mailing-list for review (and merge).

  • It is advisable to send the patch using git send-mail:

    • git send-email --to="<mailing-list>" <patch-file>