Contributing to FreeBSD

[John Nielsen]

On Apr 26, 2016, at 2:38 PM, Rafael Rodrigues Nakano <mseqs at bsd.com.br> wrote:

> I would like to contribute to FreeBSD in terms of code, but I don't know
> where, exactly. I use most of the time C in my free time hobby projects,
> but I know a bit of C++ and the concept of OOP. But I found no way to
> contribute to the system itself, I should study more before entering the
> Operating System Programming world. However, like I said, I'd like to
> contribute to FreeBSD, so, should I try to enhance the user-level
> applications or something like this? (I saw that 'freebsd-version' is a
> shell script and I think I could make a more information-detailed version
> in C, or something else). Sorry if it's a really dumb question, I like
> FreeBSD so much and I know I need to contribute to the development somehow.

Hi!

Start here and follow the links, including to the project ideas page and the PR database (bugzilla):
https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/contributing/

Get involved in the mailing lists, try things out and see what interests you. If you find (or fix!) bugs, submit problem reports to Bugzilla. You can also contribute patches to existing PRs.

> Is this the correct way (if not, the easiest one) to start contributing to
> such a great OS project like this?
> 
> And, finally, how exactly I submit my code? CVS? Git? By email?

As mentioned you can use Bugzilla to submit problem reports and patches. You can also use it to submit new ports.

The mailing lists are appropriate for discussion of new features and small patches. Larger patches can be submitted to Phabricator (https://reviews.freebsd.org/) for review. Phabricator is also a good place to look at other work in progress.

The official FreeBSD code repositories are Subversion, but there is a growing number of people using git. There are now official github repos for FreeBSD, which are updated regularly from the SVN repos:
https://wiki.freebsd.org/GitWorkflow

HTH,

JN