Fossil users are encouraged to contributed enhancements back to the project. This note outlines some of the procedures for making useful contributions.
1.0 Contributor Agreement
In order to accept non-trivial contributions, we must have a Contributor Agreement (PDF) (or 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.
2.0 Submitting Patches
Suggested changes or bug fixes can be submitted by creating a patch against the current source tree:
fossil diff -i > my-change.patch
Post patches to the forum or email them to drh@sqlite.org. 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 a Fossil bundle instead. Unlike patches, bundles can contain multiple commits, check-in comments, file renames, file deletions, branching decisions, and more which patch(1) 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.
3.0 Check-in Privileges
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 the forum. A signed contributor agreement is, of course, a prerequisite for check-in privileges.
Contributors are asked to make all non-trivial changes on a branch. The Fossil Architect (Richard Hipp) will merge changes onto the trunk.
Contributors are required to follow the 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 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.
4.0 Testing
Fossil's 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.
5.0 UI and Documentation Language
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.