Contributing to Xapian

Xapian is an open source project, depending on a community of volunteers. There are lots of ways of contributing to Xapian:

• Join our mailing lists or chat channel and help people out.
• Talk or write about Xapian. By explaining how you’ve used Xapian you not only help spread the word, but also might learn more about Xapian itself.
• Let us know (either via our bug tracker or by the mailing lists or IRC) if you run into any problems with our documentation, or with bugs you come across while using Xapian.
• Help improve our documentation, either by suggesting changes or by writing up something on our list of missing documentation.
• Contribute new features by working on one of our project ideas
• Tackle an existing bug or feature request, or something you yourself want to see in Xapian.
• Help others get their changes into shape for inclusion in Xapian.

One of the things this guide will do is take you through the process of getting comfortable with the Xapian codebase and submitting your first “patch”. There’s also lots of more detailed information if you want to get more deeply involved in writing code for Xapian.

• Licensing your contributions
• Advice for new contributors
  • Checking out and building Xapian
  • Learn about Xapian’s API
  • Get familiar with the code
  • Picking something to start with
  • Do some work
• A helpful workflow
  • Claim the ticket in trac
  • Create a branch in your local git repository
  • Write a plan
  • Make your changes!
  • Make commits out of your changes
  • Contribute your changes
• Contributing changes
  • License grant
  • Some things that we look for
  • Update trac
  • Consider backporting bug fixes
  • Submit your patch
• Adding support for other programming languages
  • Ambition
  • Some things you need to know
  • Experiments and partially-completed bindings
• Handy tips for aiding development
  • Disabling documentation builds
  • Integration syntax checking with your editor