Contributing Patches

Joint Copyright Assignment

To submit any code to OO.o you need to sign the Joint Copyright Assignment. This process can take some time, so check Pending JCAs to see if yours is pending legal review.

Diff style

Always use unified diffs cvs -z3 diff -u, since they are the most readable, (and sensible) types of diff to read and apply. If you're not using them - most likely you want to setup your cvsrc properly.

Some interaction

It tends to be a good idea to work out how best to implement your fix, and/or discuss it with a developer or two before hand. Some of the best ways to do this are to post to [1] or lurk on IRC at irc.freenode.net on the #OpenOffice.org, or #go-oo channels. IRC is an awfully poor communication medium, but better than no communication.

See DomainDeveloper to unwind who is whom.

Filing up-stream

The best hacker centric bug filing interface is here. Whack the patch there & wait for feedback.

Sometimes assigning the bug to the code owner helps accelerate the process. We can sometimes extract the owner of a module by checking for the ADMIN_FILE_OWNER tag; there is a little tool in ooo-build/bin/owner <file-name> that helps you find out who to E-mail / interact with about a given module; it's worth assigning very specifically located bugs to that person.

ooo-build patch creation

Of course - you may want to get other people excited about your work & get it included in more live builds; if so:

Once you have created your patch you need to add it to the apply file so it can be applied by apply.pl during build time.

Then simply re-run 'make' in the toplevel - this should incrementally apply your patch to an (untouched) build tree.