How to contribute bug fixes and feature enhancements to Rosegarden project

There are numerous ways to contribute to Rosegarden. You may

• Create a patch (described in this page)

• Report a bug

• Create a feature request (Please understand that some good requests everyone likes have still been on the waiting list for several years.)

• Add or update translation

• Discuss in Rosegarden's mailing lists

• Update documentation (needs a page, but first we actually need to establish a new documentation structure)

Let's proceed on and follow steps on how to prepare a patch for Rosegarden…

svn co https://rosegarden.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/rosegarden/trunk/rosegarden

Rosegarden has many dependencies. It should be possible to satisfy the build requirements using stock packages from any recent distro at least as far back as Ubuntu 8.04, although we strongly recommend building with Qt 4.5 or later if possible, due to its very significant improvement in graphics rendering speed.

This is a fresh attempt to write out a complete list. If you install everything listed here and are still unable to build Rosegarden, please get in touch with us or create an account and edit this list yourself to share your findings.

You will need the following programs and libraries available on your system:

(Using Debian Lenny as the oldest supportable distro for this)

$ sh ./bootstrap.sh

$ ./configure [options]

Useful things to specify for [options] include:

• –prefix=[ desired installation path (typically /usr) ]
• QTDIR=[ location of Qt library files ]
• –enable-debug

$ make

$ sudo make install

NOTE: Rosegarden only installs a few files, and these will not overwrite or conflict with any version you may have installed from a distro package of Rosegarden “Classic”

Edit files, paying attention to coding style… If you made no changes to anything in data/ then you can simply:

$ make && ./rosegarden

If you did make changes to data, you should

$ make qrc && make && ./rosegarden

If you added any new icons, for example, they won't be picked up and added to the resource bundle until you svn add them to your local copy. Even though you're submitting a patch, you must still do this. Hopefully new files will get picked up and incorporated into the patch, although I don't think there's a precedent for this, and I'm not sure if it would work. If this becomes a problem, get in touch with us, and we'll work something out.

cd to the Rosegarden source root directory, then

$ svn update

$ svn diff > patch-user-[YEAR][DAY][MONTH]

for example patch-egonzales-20092305 for a patch from Eduardo Gonzáles on the 23rd of May 2009

Create new bug report (if there is not an existing one), and include the patch as a resolution to the bug.

Create new feature request (if there is not an existing one), and include the patch as a fulfillment of the request.

Describe your problem in a mail to the list and add the patch as an attachment. If your patch is large, your post might be rejected by the list software, but the project administrators will attend to this if it should happen.

Your patch will be reviewed by one or more Rosegarden developers. Be prepared to improve the patch and resubmit it. We do like getting patches, and are often happy to fix problems with them, so don't be reticent about sending them in even if they're incomplete or imperfect. If you get stuck, send us what you've got!

• Working with branches

• Coding Style

• Qt Layouts

• File Format Version