Contributing to FreeBSD

Jordan Hubbard

$FreeBSD: doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/contributing/article.sgml,v 1.473 2001/11/23 18:31:04 des Exp $

This article describes the different ways in which an individual or organization may contribute to the FreeBSD Project.

Table of Contents
1 What Is Needed
2 How to Contribute

So you want to contribute something to FreeBSD? That is great! We can always use the help, and FreeBSD is one of those systems that relies on the contributions of its user base in order to survive. Your contributions are not only appreciated, they are vital to FreeBSD's continued growth!

Contrary to what some people might also have you believe, you do not need to be a hot-shot programmer or a close personal friend of the FreeBSD core team in order to have your contributions accepted. The FreeBSD Project's development is done by a large and growing number of international contributors whose ages and areas of technical expertise vary greatly, and there is always more work to be done than there are people available to do it.

Since the FreeBSD project is responsible for an entire operating system environment (and its installation) rather than just a kernel or a few scattered utilities, our TODO list also spans a very wide range of tasks, from documentation, beta testing and presentation to highly specialized types of kernel development. No matter what your skill level, there is almost certainly something you can do to help the project!

Commercial entities engaged in FreeBSD-related enterprises are also encouraged to contact us. Need a special extension to make your product work? You will find us receptive to your requests, given that they are not too outlandish. Working on a value-added product? Please let us know! We may be able to work cooperatively on some aspect of it. The free software world is challenging a lot of existing assumptions about how software is developed, sold, and maintained throughout its life cycle, and we urge you to at least give it a second look.

1 What Is Needed

The following list of tasks and sub-projects represents something of an amalgam of the various core team TODO lists and user requests we have collected over the last couple of months. Where possible, tasks have been ranked by degree of urgency. If you are interested in working on one of the tasks you see here, send mail to the coordinator listed by clicking on their names. If no coordinator has been appointed, maybe you would like to volunteer?

1.1 Ongoing Tasks

Most of the tasks listed in the previous sections require either a considerable investment of time or an in-depth knowledge of the FreeBSD kernel (or both). However, there are also many useful tasks which are suitable for ``weekend hackers'', or people without programming skills.

If you run FreeBSD-current and have a good Internet connection, there is a machine current.FreeBSD.org which builds a full release once a day -- every now and again, try and install the latest release from it and report any failures in the process.
Read the freebsd-bugs mailing list. There might be a problem you can comment constructively on or with patches you can test. Or you could even try to fix one of the problems yourself.
Read through the FAQ and Handbook periodically. If anything is badly explained, out of date or even just completely wrong, let us know. Even better, send us a fix (SGML is not difficult to learn, but there is no objection to ASCII submissions).
Help translate FreeBSD documentation into your native language (if not already available) -- just send an email to FreeBSD documentation project mailing list <freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.org> asking if anyone is working on it. Note that you are not committing yourself to translating every single FreeBSD document by doing this -- in fact, the documentation most in need of translation is the installation instructions.
Read the freebsd-questions mailing list and the comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc newsgroup occasionally (or even regularly). It can be very satisfying to share your expertise and help people solve their problems; sometimes you may even learn something new yourself! These forums can also be a source of ideas for things to work on.
If you know of any bug fixes which have been successfully applied to -current but have not been merged into -stable after a decent interval (normally a couple of weeks), send the committer a polite reminder.
Move contributed software to src/contrib in the source tree.
Make sure code in src/contrib is up to date.
Build the source tree (or just part of it) with extra warnings enabled and clean up the warnings.
Fix warnings for ports which do deprecated things like using gets() or including malloc.h.
If you have contributed any ports, send your patches back to the original author (this will make your life easier when they bring out the next version)
Suggest further tasks for this list!

1.2 Work through the PR Database

The FreeBSD PR list shows all the current active problem reports and requests for enhancement that have been submitted by FreeBSD users. Look through the open PRs, and see if anything there takes your interest. Some of these might be very simple tasks, that just need an extra pair of eyes to look over them and confirm that the fix in the PR is a good one. Others might be much more complex.

Start with the PRs that have not been assigned to anyone else, but if one them is assigned to someone else, but it looks like something you can handle, email the person it is assigned to and ask if you can work on it--they might already have a patch ready to be tested, or further ideas that you can discuss with them.

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