Code review

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NOTE FOR CONTRIBUTORS:

The preferred development style is: work on Libreboot, and port changes from each Libreboot release into Canoeboot, but do it all at once. Whenever a new Libreboot release comes out, a Canoeboot release will happen either simultaneously or a few days later, porting all suitable changes over from the Libreboot release. More information about this is available in the about page.

In other words: please only send patches directly to Canoeboot, if they are patches that only Canoeboot can benefit from; use your best judgement. The same rule applies for bug reports and testing; do Libreboot first.

Leah Rowe is the founder and lead developer of both Canoeboot and Libreboot. Please see: Libreboot git page and Libreboot testers page.

Canoeboot repositories

Information about who works on canoeboot and who runs the project can be found on who.html

The canoeboot project has 3 main Git repositories:

Development of canoeboot is done using the Git version control system. Refer to the official Git documentation if you don’t know how to use Git.

cbmk (canoeboot-make)

This is the core build system in canoeboot. You could say that cbmk is canoeboot! Download the Git repository:

git clone https://codeberg.org/canoeboot/cbmk

The git command, seen above, will download the canoeboot build system cbmk. You can then go into it like so:

cd cbmk

Make whatever changes you like, or simply build it. For instructions on how to build cbmk, refer to the build instructions.

Information about the build system itself, and how it works, is available in the cbmk maintenance guide.

cbwww and cbwww-img

The entire canoeboot website and documentation is hosted in a Git repository. Download it like so:

git clone https://codeberg.org/canoeboot/cbwww

Images are hosted on https://av.canoeboot.org/ and available in a separate repository:

git clone https://codeberg.org/canoeboot/cbwww-img

Make whatever changes you like. See notes below about how to send patches.

The entire website is written in Markdown, specifically the Pandoc version of it. The static HTML pages are generated with Untitled. Leah Rowe, the founder of canoeboot, is also the founder of the Untitled static site generator project.

If you like, you can set up a local HTTP server and build your own local version of the website. Please note that images will still link to the ones hosted on https://av.canoeboot.org/, so any images that you add to cbwww-img will not show up on your local cbwww site if you make the image links (for images that you add) link to av.canoeboot.org. However, it is required that such images be hosted on av.canoeboot.org.

Therefore, if you wish to add images to the website, please also submit to the cbwww-img repository, with the links to them being https://av.canoeboot.org/path/to/your/new/image/in/cbwww-img for each one. When it is merged on the canoeboot website, your images will appear live.

If adding a photo, compress it for web distribution. Images should be about 800px wide, and usually under 100KiB in size:

First, scale your image down to approximately 800px width, using your favourite image manipulation program. For example, with imagemagick you can do the following (make sure the image isn’t already smaller or equal than preferred).

convert original.jpg -resize 600000@ -quality 70% web.jpg

You should always run jpegoptim on jpg images before submitting them. It strips useless metadata and losslessly optimises them further by cleverly rearranging the huffman tables used in them.

jpegoptim -s --all-progressive web.jpg

If the image is a (line) drawing, vector graphics are preferable to bitmaps. Therefore, if possible, save them as SVGs. Those are easy to modify, and will surely make translators’ work easier as well.

PNG images should be optimised with zopfli (this is lossless as well). For example, this reduced the Canoeboot boot logo from around 11k to 3k:

zopflipng -ym image.png image.png

For development purposes, you might make your images local links first, and then adjust the URLs when you submit your documentation/website patches.

Instructions are on the Untitled website, for how to set up your local version of the website. Download untitled, and inside your untitled directory, create a directory named www/ then go inside the www directory, and clone the cbwww repository there. Configure your local HTTP server accordingly.

Again, instructions are available on the Untitled website for this purpose.

Name not required

Contributions that you make are publicly recorded, in a Git repository which everyone can access. This includes the name and email address of the contributor.

In Git, for author name and email address, you do not have to use identifying data. You can use canoeboot Contributor and your email address could be specified as contributor@canoeboot.org. You are permitted to do this, if you wish to maintain privacy. We believe in privacy. If you choose to remain anonymous, we will honour this.

Of course, you can use whichever name and/or email address you like.

Legally speaking, all copyright is automatic under the Berne Convention of international copyright law. It does not matter which name, or indeed whether you even declare a copyright (but we do require that certain copyright licenses are used - read more about that on this same page).

If you use a different name and email address on your commits/patches, then you should be fairly anonymous. Use git log and git show to confirm that before you push changes to a public Git repository.

Licenses (for contributors)

Make sure to freely license your work, under a libre license. Canoeboot no longer sets arbitrary restrictions on what licenses are accepted, and many licenses out there already exist. We will audit your contribution and tell you if there are problems with it (e.g. no license).

Always declare a license on your work! Not declaring a license means that the default, restrictive copyright laws apply, which would make your work proprietary, subject to all of the same restrictions.

The MIT license is a good one to start with, and it is the preferred license for all new works in Canoeboot, but we’re not picky. Canoeboot has historically used GNU licensing such as GPL; much of that remains, and is likely to remain. It’s your work; obviously, if you’re deriving from an existing work, it may make sense to use the same license on your contribution, for license compatibility.

You can find common examples of licenses here.

If you are deriving from an existing work, it’s important that your license (for your contribution) be compatible with the licensing of the work from which yours was derived. The MIT license is good because it’s widely compatible with many other licenses, and permits many freedoms (such as the freedom to sublicense) that other licenses do not:

https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT

Send patches

Make an account on https://codeberg.org/ and navigate (while logged in) to the repository that you wish to work on. Click Fork and in your account, you will have your own repository of canoeboot. Clone your repository, make whatever changes you like to it and then push to your repository, in your account on Codeberg. You can also do this on a new branch, if you wish.

In your Codeberg account, you can then navigate to the official canoeboot repository and submit a Pull Request. The way it works is similar to other popular web-based Git platforms that people use these days.

You can submit your patches there. Alternative, you can log onto the canoeboot IRC channel and notify the channel of which patches you want reviewed, if you have your own Git repository with the patches.

Once you have issued a Pull Request, the canoeboot maintainers will be notified via email. If you do not receive a fast enough response from the project, then you could also notify the project via the #canoeboot channel on Libera Chat.

Another way to submit patches is to email Leah Rowe directly: info@minifree.org is Leah’s project email address.

However, for transparency of the code review process, it’s recommended that you use Codeberg, for the time being.

Git mirrors

Mirrors of cbmk.git

The cbmk repository contains Canoeboot’s automated build system, which produces Canoeboot releases (including compiled ROM images).

You can run git clone on any of these links (the links are also clickable, to view changes in your Web browser):

cbwww.git mirror

The cbwww repository contains Markdown files (pandoc variant), for use with the Untitled Static Site Generator; this is what Canoeboot uses to provide HTML web pages, including the page that you are reading right now!

You can run git clone on these links, and/or click to view changes in your Web browser. See:

cbwww-img.git mirror

You can run git clone on these links, and/or click to view changes in your Web browser. See:

Markdown file for this page: https://canoeboot.org/git.md

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