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,
- only send text emails—no HTML allowed;
- do not top post;
- use and abuse the mailing list archive to see how proper discussions are handled;
- 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
- Build instructions
./bootstrap
./configure
make
make check
make install
For a detailed explanation, read theINSTALL
andREADME-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 usegit 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 inREADME-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>