kea/doc/devel/contribute.dox

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/**

 @page contributorGuide BIND10 Contributor's Guide

So you found a bug in BIND10 or plan to develop an extension and want to
send a patch? Great! This page will explain how to contribute your
changes smoothly.

@section contributorGuideWritePatch Writing a patch

Before you start working on a patch or a new feature, it is a good idea
to discuss it first with BIND10 developers. You can post your questions
to the \c bind10-dev mailing list
(https://lists.isc.org/mailman/listinfo/bind10-dev) for general BIND10
stuff, or to the \c bind10-dhcp mailing list
(https://lists.isc.org/mailman/listinfo/bind10-dhcp) for DHCP specific
topics. If you prefer to get faster feedback, most BIND10 developers
hang out in the \c bind10 jabber room
(xmpp:bind10@conference.jabber.isc.org). Those involved in DHCP also use
the \c dhcp chatroom (xmpp:dhcp@conference.jabber.isc.org). Feel free to
join these rooms and talk to us. It is possible that someone else is
working on your specific issue or perhaps the solution you plan to
implement is not the best one. Often having a 10 minute talk could save
many hours of engineering work.

First step would be to get the source code from our Git repository. The
procedure is very easy and is explained here:
http://bind10.isc.org/wiki/GitGuidelines.  While it is possible to
provide a patch against the latest stable release, it makes the review
process much easier if it is for latest code from the Git \c master
branch.

Ok, so you have written a patch? Great! Before you submit it, make sure
that your code compiles. This may seem obvious, but there's more to
it. You have surely checked that it compiles on your system, but BIND10
is portable software. Besides Linux, it is compiled and used on
relatively uncommon systems like OpenBSD and Solaris 11. Will your code
compile and work there? What about endianess? It is likely that you used
a regular x86 architecture machine to write your patch, but the software
is expected to run on many other architectures. You may take a look at
system specific build notes (http://bind10.isc.org/wiki/SystemSpecificNotes).
For a complete list of systems we build on, you may take a look at the
following build farm report: http://git.bind10.isc.org/~tester/builder/builder-new.html .

Does your patch conform to BIND10 coding guidelines
(http://bind10.isc.org/wiki/CodingGuidelines)? You still can submit a
patch that does not adhere to it, but that will decrease its chances of
being accepted. If the deviations are minor, the BIND10 engineer who
does the review will likely fix the issues. However, if there are lots
of issues, the reviewer may simply reject the patch and ask you to fix
it before re-submitting.

@section contributorGuideUnittests Running unit-tests

One of the ground rules in BIND10 development is that every piece of
code has to be tested. We now have an extensive set of unit-tests for
almost every line of code. Even if you are fixing something small,
like a single line fix, it is encouraged to write unit-tests for that
change. That is even more true for new code. If you write a new
function, method or a class, you definitely should write unit-tests
for it.

BIND10 uses the Google C++ Testing Framework (also called googletest or
gtest) as a base for our C++ unit-tests. See
http://code.google.com/p/googletest/ for details. For Python unit-tests,
we use the its \c unittest library which is included in Python. You must
have \c gtest installed or at least extracted in a directory before
compiling BIND10 unit-tests. To enable unit-tests in BIND10, use:

@code
./configure --with-gtest=/path/to/your/gtest/dir
@endcode

or

@code
./configure --with-gtest-source=/path/to/your/gtest/dir
@endcode

Depending on how you compiled or installed \c gtest (e.g. from sources
or using some package management system) one of those two switches will
find \c gtest. After that you make run unit-tests:

@code
make check
@endcode

If you happen to add new files or have modified any \c Makefile.am
files, it is also a good idea to check if you haven't broken the
distribution process:

@code
make distcheck
@endcode

There are other useful switches which can be passed to configure. It is
always a good idea to use \c --enable-logger-checks, which does sanity
checks on logger parameters. Use \c --enable-debug to enable various
additional consistency checks that reduce performance but help during
development. If you happen to modify anything in the
documentation, use \c --enable-generate-docs. If you are modifying DHCP
code, you are likely to be interested in enabling the MySQL backend for
DHCP. Note that if the backend is not enabled, MySQL specific unit-tests
are skipped. From that perspective, it is useful to use
\c --with-dhcp-mysql. For a complete list of all switches, use:

@code
 ./configure --help
@endcode

@section contributorGuideReview Going through a review

Once all those are checked and working, feel free to create a ticket for
your patch at http://bind10.isc.org/ or attach your patch to an existing
ticket if you have fixed it. It would be nice if you also join the
\c bind10 or \c dhcp chatroom saying that you have submitted a
patch. Alternatively, you may send a note to the \c bind10-dev or
\c bind10-dhcp mailing lists.

Here's the tricky part. One of BIND10 developers will review your patch,
but it may not happen immediately. Unfortunately, developers are usually
working under a tight schedule, so any extra unplanned review work may
take a while sometimes. Having said that, we value external
contributions very much and will do whatever we can to review patches in
a timely manner. Don't get discouraged if your patch is not accepted
after first review. To keep the code quality high, we use the same
review processes for internal code and for external patches. It may take
some cycles of review/updated patch submissions before the code is
finally accepted.

Once the process is almost complete, the developer will likely ask you
how you would like to be credited. The typical answers are by first and
last name, by nickname, by company name or anonymously. Typically we
will add a note to the \c ChangeLog and also set you as the author of
the commit applying the patch. If the contributted feature is big or
critical for whatever reason, it may also be mentioned in release notes.

@section contributorGuideExtra Extra steps

If you are interested in knowing the results of more in-depth testing,
you are welcome to visit the BIND10 build farm:
http://git.bind10.isc.org/~tester/builder/builder-new.html.  This is a
live result page with all tests being run on various systems.  Besides
basic unit-tests, we also have reports from Valgrind (memory debugger),
cppcheck and clang-analyzer (static code analyzers), Lettuce system
tests and more. Although it is not possible for non ISC employees to run
tests on that farm, it is possible that your contributed patch will end
up there sooner or later.

*/