We welcome contributions to the L4Re project. However, to incorporate your contribution we are required to have a signed Contributor License Agreement (CLA) from you on file. The CLA certifies:

1. That you have the rights to give us the contribution and
2. That you give us the rights to use your contribution.

Please sign the Contributor License Agreement and email it to licensing@kernkonzept.com, fax to +49 351 41 888 619, or send the original to Kernkonzept GmbH, Buchenstr. 16b, 01097 Dresden, Germany.

If you feel it is too cumbersome to go through the whole CLA process for trivial contributions such as typo fixes, then please create an issue and we will fix it for you.

In order to maintain the high quality of the codebase we review each patch before it is submitted to our private master branch. We will continue to act as gatekeepers for pushing patches into the public repositories. That means that each contribution will be reviewed by Kernkonzept internally, before it gets merged to our private master branch and eventually gets published into the public repositories. Note that this can take quite a while as we may depend on external funding to do the work.

If you seek to make a large or involving change please open an issue up front and start discussing the details with us.

This guide contains a collection of suggestions for a person or company not familiar with our development process to help getting your contribution accepted.

Describe the problem your patch is solving. If your patch fixes a known bug, refer to that issue by number or URL. After describing the problem, describe in technical detail what you are actually doing to fix it.

Separate each logical change into a separate patch that can be verified by our reviewers. Solve one problem per patch.

If you divide a change into a series of patches, take special care to ensure that the project builds and runs properly after each single patch of the series is applied.

If one patch depends on another patch simply note "this patch depends on patch X" in the patch description.

Check your patch for basic style violations. See our coding style guide for guidance.

Most contributions will almost certainly receive review comments. Please respond to those comments to show that you care about you contribution.