<title>Contributing To Fossil</title>

Fossil users are encouraged to contributed enhancements back to the
project.  This note outlines some of the procedures for making
useful contributions.

<h2>1.0 Contributor Agreement</h2>

In order to accept non-trivial contributions, we <u>must</u> have a
[./copyright-release.pdf | Contributor Agreement (PDF)]
(or [./copyright-release.html | as HTML]) on file for you.  We require
this in order to maintain clear title to the Fossil code and prevent
the introduction of code with incompatible licenses or other entanglements
that might cause legal problems for Fossil users.  Many
lawyer-rich organizations require this as a precondition to using
Fossil.

If you do not wish to submit a Contributor Agreement, we would still
welcome your suggestions and example code, but we will not use your code
directly: we will be forced to re-implement your changes from scratch, which
might take longer.

We've made exceptions for "trivial" changes in the past, but the
definition of that term is up to the project leader.

<h2>2.0 Submitting Patches</h2>

Suggested changes or bug fixes can be submitted by creating a patch
against the current source tree:

    <tt>fossil diff -i > my-change.patch</tt>

Post patches to
[https://fossil-scm.org/forum | the forum] or email them to
<a href="mailto:drh@sqlite.org">drh@sqlite.org</a>.  Be sure to
describe in detail what the patch does and which version of Fossil
it is written against. It's best to make patches against tip-of-trunk
rather than against past releases.

If your change is more complicated than a patch can properly encode, you
may submit [/help?cmd=bundle | a Fossil bundle] instead. Unlike patches,
bundles can contain multiple commits, check-in comments, file renames,
file deletions, branching decisions, and more which <tt>patch(1)</tt>
files cannot. It's best to make a bundle of a new branch so the change
can be integrated, tested, enhanced, and merged down to trunk in a
controlled fashion.

A contributor agreement is not strictly necessary to submit a patch or bundle,
but without a contributor agreement on file, your contribution will be
used for reference only: it will not be applied to the code.  This
may delay acceptance of your contribution.

Your contribution might not be accepted even if you do have
a contributor agreement on file.  Please do not take this personally
or as an affront to your coding ability.  Sometimes contributions are rejected
because they seem to be taking the project in a direction that the
architect does not want to go.  In other cases, there might be an alternative
implementation of the same feature being prepared separately.

<h2>3.0 Check-in Privileges</h2>

Check-in privileges are granted on a case-by-case basis.   Your chances
of getting check-in privileges are much improved if you have a history
of submitting quality patches and/or making thoughtful posts on
[https://fossil-scm.org/forum | the forum].
A signed contributor agreement is, of course, a prerequisite for check-in
privileges.</p>

Contributors are asked to make all non-trivial changes on a branch.  The
Fossil Architect (Richard Hipp) will merge changes onto the trunk.</p>

Contributors are required to follow the
[./checkin.wiki | pre-checkin checklist] prior to every check-in to
the Fossil self-hosting repository.  This checklist is short and succinct
and should only require a few seconds to follow.  Contributors
should print out a copy of the pre-checkin checklist and keep
it on a note card beside their workstations for quick reference.

Contributors should review the
[./style.wiki | Coding Style Guidelines] and mimic the coding style
used through the rest of the Fossil source code.  Your code should
blend in.  A third-party reader should be unable to distinguish your
code from any other code in the source corpus.

<h2>4.0 Testing</h2>

Fossil's [../test/release-checklist.wiki | release checklist] is of
primary benefit to the project leader, followed by him at release time,
but contributors are encouraged to run through its steps when making
major changes, since if the change doesn't pass this checklist, it won't
be included in the next release.

<h2>5.0 UI and Documentation Language</h2>

The Fossil project uses American English in its web interface and
documentation. Until there is some provision for translating the UI and
docs into other languages and dialects, we ask that you do not commit
changes that conflict with this.

We aren't opposed to such a project, but it would be a huge amount of
work, which no one's stepped up to do yet. Not only is each individual
translation a large ongoing job its own right, there is no
infrastructure for it yet, so the first few translations will be harder
than any future translation built on that infrastructure.

More immediately, we're likely to reject, revert, or rework commits that
use other English dialects. One example that comes up occasionally is
"artefact" versus "artifact." The UI and docs use the American English
spelling pervasively, so you have poor options if you insist on
"artefact:"

  *  attempt to slip one-off changes by your peers
  *  attempt to change all American English usages to Commonwealth English
  *  make the Fossil UI and docs translatable, then contribute a
     Commonwealth English translation

Only the latter is likely to succeed.

<h2>6.0 See Also</h2>

  *  [./build.wiki | How To Compile And Install Fossil]
  *  [./makefile.wiki | The Fossil Build Process]
  *  [./tech_overview.wiki | A Technical Overview of Fossil]
  *  [./adding_code.wiki | Adding Features To Fossil]
