Buildroot how to contribute

A short guide, basically copy/paste from mailing list.

Patches should be sent to mailing list.

Configure Git

Configure your name and e-mail. This needs to be only once, if configured with --global. If you want to use some other settings for buildroot project, you first need to clone buildroot repository and then use these same commands without --global keyword.

git config --global user.name "Firstname Lastname"
git config --global user.email firstname.lastname at somewhere.com

And tell git how to send emails

git config --global sendemail.smtpserver mysmtpserver

And to avoid chained reply

git config --global sendemail.chainreplyto false

Basic workflow

1. Clone (to be done only once)
   • git clone git://git.busybox.net/buildroot
2. Configure Git, if not done already
3. Create a branch to work on your topic (to be done for every separate topic you'd like to work with)
   • git checkout -b mytopic
     • Note that this also switches immediatly to the new mytopic branch. You can run 'git branch' at any time to know on which branch you are.
4. Make some modifications, for one particuler subtopic (like adding the vala compiler)
5. Commit those modifications
6. git commit -s -a
   • And enter an appropriate commit log.
     • If you created new files, add them with "git add".
7. Review your changes
   • git log -p master..
8. Prepare patches for your changes
   • git format-patch master
     • This will generate a set of 000X-*.patch files in the Buildroot directory
9. Send your patches to the list
   • git send-email --to buildroot at uclibc.org --compose *.patch
10. All done

In case of mistakes in my branch

If while reviewing your commits you find that you need to merge some of them (because you did some mistakes that you fixed later and you don't want the world to know about your mistakes), then you have to use the rebasing feature of git

git rebase -i master

Git will open up a text editor with the list of your commits. You can edit this file to change the order of the commits, or to change the action taken on a particular commit (see the file itself for documentation on those actions).

pick SOMEGITHASH package: add foobar
pick SOMEGITHASH package: add barfoo
pick SOMEGITHASH I did something wrong in add foobar, merge me

So obviously you want the last commit to be merged into the first one, so that nobody knows you did some mistakes during your development. So, turn those three lines into the following ones

pick SOMEGITHASH package: add foobar
fixup SOMEGITHASH I did something wrong in add foobar, merge me
pick SOMEGITHASH package: add barfoo

And exit the text editor. Git will reorganize your commits, and you'll end up with just two commits.