CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing to GNU Stow

Development of Stow, and GNU in general, is a volunteer effort, and you can contribute. If you'd like to get involved, it's a good idea to join the stow-devel mailing list.

Bug reporting

Please follow the procedure described in the "Reporting Bugs" section of the manual.

Development

For development sources and other information, please see the Stow project page at savannah.gnu.org.

There is also a stow-devel mailing list (see Mailing lists).

Please be aware that all program source files (excluding the test suite) end in .in, and are pre-processed by Makefile into corresponding files with that prefix stripped before execution. So if you want to test any modifications to the source, make sure that you change the .in files and then run make to regenerate the pre-processed versions before doing any testing. To avoid forgetting (which can potentially waste a lot of time debugging the wrong code), you can automatically run make in an infinite loop every second via:

make watch

(You could even use fancier approaches like inotifywait(1) or Guard. But those are probably overkill in this case where the simple while loop is plenty good enough.)

Testing

The test suite can be found in the [`t/`](t/) subdirectory.  You can
run the test suite via:

    make check

Tests can be run individually as follows.  First you have to ensure
that the `t/`, `bin/`, and `lib/` directories are on Perl's search path.
Assuming that you run all tests from the root of the repository tree,
this will do the job:

    export PERL5LIB=t:bin:lib

(Not all tests require all of these, but it's safer to include all of
them.)

Secondly, be aware that if you want to test modifications to the
source files, you will need to run `make watch`, or `make` before each
test run as explained above.

Now running an individual test is as simple as:

    perl t/chkstow.t

or with a given debugging verbosity corresponding to the `-v` / `--verbose`
command-line option:

    TEST_VERBOSE=4 perl t/chkstow.t

The [`prove(1)` test runner](https://perldoc.perl.org/prove) is another
good alternative which provides several handy extra features.  Invocation
is very similar, e.g.:

    prove t/stow.t

or to run the whole suite:

    prove

However currently there is an issue where this interferes with
`TEST_VERBOSE`.

If you want to create test files for experimentation, it is
recommended to put them in a subdirectory called `playground/` since
this will be automatically ignored by git and the build process,
avoiding any undesirable complications.

Test coverage

To view test coverage reports, first ensure that Devel::Cover is installed. Then type make coverage. The last lines of the output should include something like:

HTML output written to /home/user/path/to/stow/cover_db/coverage.html

which you can open in a web browser to view the report.

Translating Stow

Stow is not currently multi-lingual, but patches would be very gratefully accepted. Please e-mail stow-devel if you intend to work on this.

Maintainers

Stow is currently being maintained by Adam Spiers. Please use the mailing lists.

Helping the GNU project

For more general information, please read How to help GNU.