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CONTRIBUTING.md

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How to Contribute Code to CernVM-FS

We welcome code contributions!

If you are about to develop a bug fix or a new feature, it could be helpful to let us know about it beforehand, for instance on the cvmfs-devel@cern.ch mailing list or by private mail or through our ticket tracker. This can avoid duplicated work and allows us to coordinate the development.

Source Code Workflow

We use git and github to merge code changes. We roughly follow Driessen's workflow. The current development head is in the devel branch, the latest stable release is in the master branch. In order to contribute, please

  • Fork the cvmfs repository
  • Create a new branch from devel, named either feature-..., or fix-... or CVM-... (referring to JIRA)
  • Make changes, commit, and push the branch to your github space
  • and send a pull request to us on github

If possible, commits should be done in such a way that the code remains compilable. That can help to find problems with git bisect.

Code Conventions

Starting point is Google C++ style guide.

We have the following exceptions/adjustments:

  • We do use alloca() and variable-length arrays for small allocations in order to decrease memory fragmentation.
  • We use Doxygen comments. In order to not confuse the style guide checker, we use the /** form only (e.g. not ///< but /**< */). If you need structure in the code comments, use Markdown syntax.
  • We do not include the full copyright in each and every file. It's sufficient to add a comment saying that a particular file is part of CernVM-FS.
  • We currently do not include files with project-relative paths. The vast majority of source files are in ./cvmfs (although that might change).
  • using namespace std; in a .cc file is allowed. In order to keep the style checker quiet, we use using namespace std; // NOLINT.
  • We do a line break before the opening curly bracket ({), if the bracket is at the end of a multi-line statement (e.g. a multi-line if or a multi-line function definition).
  • We use C++03 (not C++11) in order to stay compatible to old system compilers.

The code repository contains a style checker which can be invoked like that:

python cpplint.py cvmfs/uuid.cc

Testing

If possible, please add tests to any new code. Preferably add tests as unit tests to the test/unittests folder, using the Google Test unit test framework. For "cross-cutting" changes that touch a few lines in many files in the code base, please add an integration test in the src/test folder. To do so, create a new subdirectory and start from one of the "main" shell scripts from another test. Client-side tests have numbers less than 500, server-side tests have numbers greater than 500.

Documentation

The sources of our technical documentation is at https://github.com/cvmfs/doc-cvmfs. We are happy to merge contributions to this document, in particular if they describe user-visible changes in the software!