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Contribution guidelines
Thanks for taking the time to contribute to the collectd project! This document tries to give some guidance to make the process of contributing to collectd as pleasant as possible.
Bug reports
Please report bugs as GitHub Issues. Try to answer the following questions:
- Which version of collectd are you using?
- Which operating system (distribution) are you using at which version?
- What is the expected behavior / output?
- What is the actual (observed) behavior / output?
- How can we reproduce the problem you're having?
- If collectd crashes, try to get a stack trace.
Please monitor your issue for a couple of days and reply to questions. To keep the project manageable, we have to do some housekeeping; meaning we will close issues that have become stale.
Code contributions
Please open a GitHub Pull Request (PR) to contribute bug fixes, features, cleanups, new plugins, … Patches sent to the mailing list have a tendency to fall through the cracks.
- Focus: Fix one thing in your PR. The smaller your change, the faster it will be reviewed and merged.
- Coding style: Please run
clang-format -style=file -i $FILEafter editing.c,.hand.protofiles. If you don't want to install clang-format locally or your version produces a different result than the formatting check on Github, usecontrib/format.shto format files using the same web service used by our check. - Documentation: New config options need to be documented in two places: the
manpage (
src/collectd.conf.pod) and the example config (src/collectd.conf.in). New plugins need to be added to theREADMEfile. - Continuous integration: Once your PR is created, our continuous integration environment will try to build it on a number of platforms. If this reports a failure, please investigate and fix the problem. We will at best do a very casual review for failing PRs.
- Don't rebase: Rebasing your branch destroys the review history. If a review takes a long time, we may ask you to rebase on a more recent commit on the main branch, but please don't do that without being asked.
- types.db: One of the most common mistakes made by new contributors is the
addition of (many) new types in the file
src/types.db. The majority of usecases can be met with one of the existing entries. If you plan to add new entries tosrc/types.db, you should talk to us early in the design process.
ChangeLog
PRs need to have a one-line summary in the PR description. This information is used to automatically generate release notes. If you got here after creating the PR, you need to go to the PR description (shown as the first "comment" on the PR, made by yourself) and edit that description. Editing a PR will trigger the "ChangeLog" status to be updated.
For the summary itself, follow this style:
ChangeLog: Foo plugin: A specific issue people had has been fixed.
The summary must be on a line of its own, with a "ChangeLog:" prefix at the beginning of the line. The text should start with "Foo plugin" to give the reader context for the information. Other common contexts are "collectd" for the core daemon, "Build system", and "Documentation". Use past tense and passive voice the for remainder, e.g. "a bug has been fixed", "a feature has been added".
Some PRs should be excluded from the release notes, e.g. changes to project
internal documentation (such as this file). Those changes are not interesting
for external users of the project and would reduce the value of the release
notes. Maintainers may use the Unlisted Change label to mark those PRs.