B.4 Contributing

If you want to submit a patch for inclusion – from solving a typo you discovered, up to adding support for a new feature – you should submit it as a bug report, using the process in Bug Reports. There are some things that you can do to increase the chances for it to be included in the official package.

Unless your patch is very small (say, under 10 lines) we require that you assign the copyright of your work to the Free Software Foundation. This is to protect the freedom of the project. If you have not already signed papers, we will send you the necessary information when you submit your contribution.

For contributions that doesn’t consist of actual programming code, the only guidelines are common sense. For code contributions, a number of style guides will help you:

• Coding Style. Follow the Linux kernel coding style²⁶.

  If you normally code using another coding standard, there is no problem, but you should run the ‘indent-gnutls’ script found in the ‘devel’ directory to reformat the code before submitting your work.

• Use the unified diff format ‘diff -u’.
• Return errors. No reason whatsoever should abort the execution of the library. Even memory allocation errors, e.g. when malloc return NULL, should work although result in an error code.
• Design with thread safety in mind. Don’t use global variables. Don’t even write to per-handle global variables unless the documented behaviour of the function you write is to write to the per-handle global variable.
• Avoid using the C math library. It causes problems for embedded implementations, and in most situations it is very easy to avoid using it.
• Document your functions. Use comments before each function headers, that, if properly formatted, are extracted into Texinfo manuals and GTK-DOC web pages.
• Supply a ChangeLog and NEWS entries, where appropriate.