Contributions to the system generally fall into one or more of the following 5 categories:
An idea or suggestion of general technical interest should be mailed to the FreeBSD technical discussions mailing list. Likewise, people with an interest in such things (and a tolerance for a high volume of mail!) may subscribe to the FreeBSD technical discussions mailing list. See The FreeBSD Handbook for more information about this and other mailing lists.
If you find a bug or are submitting a specific change,
please report it using the send-pr(1) program or its
WEB-based
equivalent. Try to fill-in each field of the bug
report. Unless they exceed 65KB, include any patches directly
in the report. If the patch is suitable to be applied to the
source tree put [PATCH]
in the synopsis of
the report. When including patches, do
not use cut-and-paste because cut-and-paste turns
tabs into spaces and makes them unusable. When patches are a
lot larger than 20KB, consider compressing them (eg. with
gzip(1) or bzip2(1)) and using uuencode(1) to
include their compressed form in your problem report.
After filing a report, you should receive confirmation
along with a tracking number. Keep this tracking number so
that you can update us with details about the problem by
sending mail to <bug-followup@FreeBSD.org>
. Use
the number as the message subject, e.g. "Re:
kern/3377"
. Additional information for any bug
report should be submitted this way.
If you do not receive confirmation in a timely fashion (3 days to a week, depending on your email connection) or are, for some reason, unable to use the send-pr(1) command, then you may ask someone to file it for you by sending mail to the FreeBSD problem reports mailing list.
See also this article on how to write good problem reports.
Changes to the documentation are overseen by the FreeBSD documentation project mailing list. Please look at the FreeBSD Documentation Project Primer for complete instructions. Send submissions and changes (even small ones are welcome!) using send-pr(1) as described in Bug Reports and General Commentary.
An addition or change to the existing source code is a somewhat trickier affair and depends a lot on how far out of date you are with the current state of FreeBSD development. There is a special on-going release of FreeBSD known as “FreeBSD-CURRENT” which is made available in a variety of ways for the convenience of developers working actively on the system. See The FreeBSD Handbook for more information about getting and using FreeBSD-CURRENT.
Working from older sources unfortunately means that your changes may sometimes be too obsolete or too divergent for easy re-integration into FreeBSD. Chances of this can be minimized somewhat by subscribing to the FreeBSD announcements mailing list and the FreeBSD-CURRENT mailing list lists, where discussions on the current state of the system take place.
Assuming that you can manage to secure fairly up-to-date sources to base your changes on, the next step is to produce a set of diffs to send to the FreeBSD maintainers. This is done with the diff(1) command.
The preferred diff(1) format for submitting patches
is the unified output format generated by diff
-u
.
%
diff -u oldfile newfile
or
%
diff -u -r -N olddir newdir
would generate a set of unified diffs for the given source file or directory hierarchy.
See diff(1) for more information.
Once you have a set of diffs (which you may test with the
patch(1) command), you should submit them for inclusion
with FreeBSD. Use the send-pr(1) program as described in
Bug Reports and General
Commentary. Do not just send the
diffs to the FreeBSD technical discussions mailing list or they will get lost! We greatly
appreciate your submission (this is a volunteer project!);
because we are busy, we may not be able to address it
immediately, but it will remain in the PR database until we
do. Indicate your submission by including
[PATCH]
in the synopsis of the
report.
If you feel it appropriate (e.g. you have added, deleted,
or renamed files), bundle your changes into a
tar
file and run the uuencode(1)
program on it. Archives created with shar(1) are also
welcome.
If your change is of a potentially sensitive nature, such as if you are unsure of copyright issues governing its further distribution then you should send it to FreeBSD core team directly rather than submitting it with send-pr(1). The FreeBSD core team reaches a much smaller group of people who do much of the day-to-day work on FreeBSD. Note that this group is also very busy and so you should only send mail to them where it is truly necessary.
Please refer to intro(9) and style(9) for some information on coding style. We would appreciate it if you were at least aware of this information before submitting code.
In the case of a significant contribution of a large body work, or the addition of an important new feature to FreeBSD, it becomes almost always necessary to either send changes as uuencoded tar files or upload them to a web or FTP site for other people to access. If you do not have access to a web or FTP site, ask on an appropriate FreeBSD mailing list for someone to host the changes for you.
When working with large amounts of code, the touchy subject of copyrights also invariably comes up. Acceptable copyrights for code included in FreeBSD are:
The BSD copyright. This copyright is most preferred due to its “no strings attached” nature and general attractiveness to commercial enterprises. Far from discouraging such commercial use, the FreeBSD Project actively encourages such participation by commercial interests who might eventually be inclined to invest something of their own into FreeBSD.
The GNU General Public License, or “GPL”.
This license is not quite as popular with us due to the
amount of extra effort demanded of anyone using the code
for commercial purposes, but given the sheer quantity of
GPL'd code we currently require (compiler, assembler, text
formatter, etc) it would be silly to refuse additional
contributions under this license. Code under the GPL also
goes into a different part of the tree, that being
/sys/gnu
or
/usr/src/gnu
, and
is therefore easily identifiable to anyone for whom the
GPL presents a problem.
Contributions coming under any other type of copyright must be carefully reviewed before their inclusion into FreeBSD will be considered. Contributions for which particularly restrictive commercial copyrights apply are generally rejected, though the authors are always encouraged to make such changes available through their own channels.
To place a “BSD-style” copyright on your
work, include the following text at the very beginning of
every source code file you wish to protect, replacing the text
between the %%
with the appropriate
information:
For your convenience, a copy of this text can be found in
/usr/share/examples/etc/bsd-style-copyright
.
We are always very happy to accept donations to further the cause of the FreeBSD Project and, in a volunteer effort like ours, a little can go a long way! Donations of hardware are also very important to expanding our list of supported peripherals since we generally lack the funds to buy such items ourselves.
The FreeBSD Foundation is a non-profit, tax-exempt foundation established to further the goals of the FreeBSD Project. As a 501(c)3 entity, the Foundation is generally exempt from US federal income tax as well as Colorado State income tax. Donations to a tax-exempt entity are often deductible from taxable federal income.
Donations may be sent in check form to:
The FreeBSD Foundation
P.O. Box 20247,
Boulder,
CO 80308
USA
The FreeBSD Foundation is now able to accept donations through the web with PayPal. To place a donation, please visit the Foundation web site.
More information about the FreeBSD Foundation can be
found in The
FreeBSD Foundation -- an Introduction. To contact
the Foundation by email, write to
<bod@FreeBSDFoundation.org>
.
The FreeBSD Project happily accepts donations of hardware that it can find good use for. If you are interested in donating hardware, please contact the Donations Liaison Office.
This, and other documents, can be downloaded from http://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/doc/
For questions about FreeBSD, read the
documentation before
contacting <questions@FreeBSD.org>.
For questions about this documentation, e-mail <doc@FreeBSD.org>.