Contributing to a free software project for the first time, can be a little overwhelming. There's lots of tools that can help you contribute: autotools, gdb, git, handling lots of email from mailing lists, text editors, etc. Don't try to immediately master everything! You have time to figure it all out! Learn a little bit and go from there. To help you in that process, this is a quick guide to get you started contributing to the Hurd:

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Sending Patches

The easiest way to send patches is with git send-email. https://git-send-email.io/ will get you up and running with sending patches really quickly!

To email your most recent change, you can use git send-email like so:

$ git send-email -1 --to=bug-hurd@gnu.org

Where -1 means sending the current (latest) commit; you can do more than 1 of course. You can do multiple --to's, if you want to send the patch to multiple lists (e.g. both to libc-alpha and bug-hurd, for glibc patches), as well as --cc to cc specific people. It is a good idea to cc the people who wrote or last changed the part of code you are changing.

If you add --rfc, the generated subject line will have [RFC PATCH] instead of [PATCH], which is roughly analogous to WIP MRs on GitLab or Draft PRs on GitHub, which means that you want to gather feedback, but don't expect the patches to merged as-is. If you post a modified version (aka a re-roll) of your patch (set), add -v2 (or -v3, -v4 etc), which will result in e.g. [PATCH v2].

When posting a larger patch series, you might want to generate the patches and send them in two distinct steps. For this, you can use git format-patch (with pretty much all the same options); that will generate a bunch of text files in your cwd that you can edit with your favorite text editor.

$ git format-patch -4 --to-bug-hurd@gnu.org \
    --cover-letter --cc=hurdExpert@gnu.org
$ git send-email *.patch

It's oftentimes a good idea to give an overview of a patch series; for this you use --cover-letter, which will generate a dummy patch number 0, which you can then write your description over.

Using Git

Git can be a little tricky to use, if you are not used to it.

$ git clone https://salsa.debian.org/hurd-team/hurd.git
$ cd hurd
$ # make a change to file
$ git add FILENAME
$ git commit -m 'trans/hello.c: Fixed a typo in a comment.'

You should probably read some of the documentation from git-scm.com. man git is another good resource.

Using Emacs' Magit

The git command line is fine enough, but Emacs' magit mode makes using git much easier (my opinion, obviously). With Magit, you can trivially re-order commits, easily reword commit messages, commit a change to an old commit (that is not HEAD), commit only portions of a file, squash commits togethor, etc. Magit is probably one of the easiest ways to work with git. You could code with any other editor, but just use Emacs to handle your git workflow.

With magit, it is easy to create patches via highlighting one or more commits, and one can then type "W" followed by "c". I personally, output said patches to the $hurd-src/patches directory. Then I can send my patches to the mailing list via:

$ cd $hurd-src/patches
$ git send-email --to=bug-hurd@gnu.org .

Using vim-figitive

vim users can use vim-fugitive, which is similiar to Magit.

Develop the Debian way

You can develop the GNU/Hurd via Debian GNU/Hurd. This Hurd wiki page has more information.

This page describes how to build the hurd.