Thanks for taking the time to contribute to the collectd project! This document tries to give some guidance to make the process of contributing to collectd as pleasant as possible.
Please report bugs as GitHub Issues. Try to answer the following questions:
- Which version of collectd are you using?
- Which operating system (distribution) are you using at which version?
- What is the expected behavior / output?
- What is the actual (observed) behavior / output?
- How can we reproduce the problem you're having?
- If collectd crashes, try to get a stack trace.
Please monitor your issue for a couple of days and reply to questions. To keep the project manageable, we have to do some housekeeping; meaning we will close issues that have become stale.
Please open a GitHub Pull Request (PR) to contribute bug fixes, features, cleanups, new plugins, … Patches sent to the mailing list have a tendency to fall through the cracks.
- Focus: Fix one thing in your PR. The smaller your change, the faster it will be reviewed and merged.
- Coding style: Please run
clang-format -style=file -i $FILE
on new files. For existing files, please blend into surrounding code, i.e. mimic the coding style of the code around your changes. - Documentation: New config options need to be documented in two places: the
manpage (
src/collectd.conf.pod
) and the example config (src/collectd.conf.in
). New plugins need to be added to theREADME
file. - Continuous integration: Once your PR is created, our continuous integration environment will try to build it on a number of platforms. If this reports a failure, please investigate and fix the problem. We will at best do a very casual review for failing PRs.
- Don't rebase: Rebasing your branch destroys the review history. If a review takes a long time, we may ask you to rebase on a more recent master, but please don't do it without being asked.
- types.db: One of the most common mistakes made by new contributors is the
addition of (many) new types in the file
src/types.db
. The majority of usecases can be met with one of the existing entries. If you plan to add new entries tosrc/types.db
, you should talk to us early in the design process.