1. Ways of contributing

There are many different ways to contribute to Frugalware. You can write documentation, translate the existing ones to your native language (or any other language you want to) maintain packages or making them better whith adding features whatever.

If you are a programmer you can help us in developing our applications. These are: pacman-g2, gfpm, fwlive, frugalwareutils, setup etc. See git.frugalware.org for different project repositories.

You can also start new projects. If you show some code we can surely host your project too if it's frugalware related. For example you want to write kfpm :)

Important
After each title in brackets you can find the target audience.

1.1. Translations (translators)

You can read the details on our Translations documentation page.

1.2. Necessary documentation (packagers, coders)

In the first part i will cover the necessary informations for those who do not have developer status yet.

In the second part we will set up the necessary config files.

First of all, we ask you to read the following documentations carefully. If you do not want to deal with packages, just want to code it's usually enough to read the git documentation as we store our code in git repositories.

I know, it is boring reading documentation, but you have to know that writing them is even worse so do not ask questions when there is the answer in the documentation. If you can not understand something feel free to join #frugalware@irc.freenode.net and ask.

1.3. Downloading and setting up the repositories

1.3.1. Getting the frugalware-current repo (packagers)

The frugalware-current repo is the development repo for the packages.

When you want to get it you need the git package. Let's get it:

# pacman-g2 -S git

Now create a git directory where you can hold all your repos. You can choose any other name of course.

$ mkdir -p ~/git
$ cd ~/git

Now clone the repo with git:

$ git clone git://git.frugalware.org/pub/frugalware/frugalware-current current
$ cd current

Now be patient while git clones all the objects and then checks out the files. Also you can use other mirrors as well.

1.3.2. Getting pacman-g2 and other code (coders)

First of all you need the repo of the program. In this example i will use pacman-g2, but the steps are very similar. NOTE: Most of our programs need the translations repo to compile)

$ mkdir -p ~/git
$ cd ~/git
$ git clone git://git.frugalware.org/pub/other/translations (optional)
$ git clone git://git.frugalware.org/pub/other/pacman-g2/pacman-g2
$ cd pacman-g2

1.3.3. Setting up the repository and sending patch via email (packagers, coders)

Now you should setup up your identity.

$ git config --global user.name "Your Name"
$ git config --global user.email email@addr.ess
$ git config branch.master.rebase true

Now you can make your changes. When finished run

$ git diff

in the repository.

Tip
You can also use git diff . (note the dot in the end). In that case git will show the changes recursively in the current directory. It is very handy when you have lot of uncommitted changes in your repo.

If you satisfied with the changes run

$ git commit -a

to commit all your changes.

If you want to cherry-pick hunks from your changes:

$ dg record

or using native git commands:

$ git add -p; git commit

Without committing your changes you can not send nor push (just developers) it.

Tip
With frugalware-* repos it's recommended to use repoman rec which is a wrapper for dg record. It sets up the patch name properly so you only need to deal with the details.

Here comes the final step. Send in the patch(es)!

$ git format-patch <hash>
$ git send-email --to frugalware-devel@frugalware.org .

<hash> is the sha1 of the last patch you do not want to submit. Run

$ git log

and you'll see the hash. Also, you can just use your existing mail client and send the patch(es) as an attachment.

If everything goes fine your patch should show up on the frugalware-devel mailing list soon.

Note
You have to subscribe to the frugalware-devel mailing list and set up your SMTP server properly (if you use git send-email).

Not really belongs to here but I want to document it somewhere. If you are a developer and want to apply such a patch, you need:

Subject: [PATCH] powwow-1.2.13-1-i686
 * new package

to:

Subject: [PATCH] powwow-1.2.13-1-i686

* new package
$ cat 0002-powwow-1.2.13-1-i686.patch | git am

You should do this in the root directory of the repository.

1.4. Further options for those who have developer account (packagers, coders)

Once you get a developer account, you have the right to request the following services:

What you should do:

Let us see what you should set up to get it work. I will also give some tips which can make your life easier.

Read this page, we collected a set of tricks when we converted from darcs to git.

1.4.1. Setting up the frugalware-* repos and repoman (packagers)

It is time to set up some necessary things. We start with the frugalware-current repo. Make sure that you are in the root of the frugalware-current repo. Also do not forget to change the username to your login name on git.frugalware.org.

$ git config remote.origin.url 'username@git.frugalware.org:/home/ftp/pub/frugalware/frugalware-current'
$ git config remote.origin.receivepack "sudo -u vmiklos git-receive-pack"
Important
Do not edit the second line! So that vmiklos have to be vmiklos. It's because he is the current owner of that repo.

As you will use repoman to upload the packages (and many other things as you'll see) we should set it up now. This step is also necessary. Open ~/.repoman.conf with your favourite editor and add the following lines:

fst_root=~/git
current_servers=("username@git.frugalware.org:/home/ftp/pub/frugalware/frugalware-current")
stable_servers=("username@git.frugalware.org:/home/ftp/pub/frugalware/frugalware-stable")
stable_pushonly="y"

Where fst_root is the directory where you store your git repos. Username is your login on git.frugalware.org. For details see man repoman.

As from now use the following command from package's directory to push your changes.

$ repoman push

It will check the FrugalBuild using fblint, then records your changes, pushes them, uploads the fpms and finally creates the changelog, updates the fdb etc. So you are done if there was no error message.

1.4.2. Setting up other repos (coders)

In repo's main directory:

$ git config remote.origin.url 'username@git.frugalware.org:/home/ftp/pub/other/pacman-g2/pacman-g2'
$ git config remote.origin.receivepack "sudo -u owner git-receive-pack"

Do not forget to change the username and repository path. For paths refer to the gitweb interface.

Note
The owner for pacman-g2, frugalwareutils, pacman-tools is usually vmiklos.

You should always review what you would push before you perform the action:

$ git fetch
$ git rebase origin/master
$ git log origin/master..master

Then you can use

$ git push

to send in your changes.

Note
The dg push wrapper does exactly this for you.