If you are new to this project and want to find out how to help, please see the Finnish FAQ first. This page explains how to contribute code and fix bugs.
In order to contribute code you need to clone our Git repository, write your changes and commit them locally. It is best to write the patches against current Git master. To submit your changes use any method you like: pull requests or patches. If you submit patches use git format-patch to create the patch and send it as an attachment (not inline) to our mailing list. Note that very large patches may be rejected by the mailing list. In that case you really should use pull requests instead, GitHub makes that easy.
If you want to help with the development of our vocabulary database (the data, not the application) please note that we are rather careful with the copyright issues related to dictionaries and word lists. You should ask for premission on our mailing list before using any external sources other than those already listed in corevoikko/voikko-fi/CONTRIBUTORS.
We use UTF-8 encoding in all parts of our development environment, web site and applications so please make sure that your tools can deal with it. Especially Git client and text editors should be run under an UTF-8 locale. Some non-ASCII characters are used in Finnish, and they may be present in file names as well. It is perfectly possible to use Voikko in an environment where some other encoding is used. If you prefer to write Finnish with a fixed 8 bit encoding, ISO-8859-15 is the best choice and ISO-8859-1 is also sufficient for most use, but in this project UTF-8 is the standard.
See the Wiki for instructions on reporting bugs you may find.
Everything under our version control system must be available under "GPL v3 or later". Additional premissions, dual licensing or use of various more permissive licenses (LGPL, GPL+GFDL, BSD, MPL, MIT) are allowed too, as long as it will be possible to distribute the work under "GPL v3 or later".
Material under some subdirectories of our projects must be available under MPL v2. These directories are:
Material under some subdirectories of our projects must be available under "GPL v2 or later". These directories are:
If your patches are large, please remember that we need them to be licensed under the same license as the files that are being patched. Usually this is required anyway by the GPL, but in case the files are distributed under multiple licenses you should give us explicit premission to use your patch under all of the relevant licenses. If you send us new source, data or documentation files, you can generally pick any license you want as long as it is compatible with our licensing policy. All source files should have explicit license header, unless it is unreasonable to do so.
We do not ask for copyrights being transferred to us or anyone else (this would be very difficult to do under Finnish copyright law anyway). Please do not send anonymous patches, they will be rejected if they are longer than about five lines of code.
After switching to Git from Subversion push access was offered to all developers who previously had commit access to Subversion. In the future we will prefer developers to take advantage of the distributed nature of Git and use forks and pull to deliver the changes. Thus we will only add new people with push access if they are really active and trustworthy.
Voikko is becoming rather complex piece of software. Therefore we will be gradually adding more automated tests to avoid serious regressions in quality. All committers must be aware of the available testing methods for the code or other material they are modifying. The testing methods are described on a separate page. For voikko-fi and libvoikko you should use voikkotest --base, voikkotest --current and voikkotest --compare before committing any code or vocabulary changes. For libreoffice-voikko the published test document should be used to test all changes.
It is also the responsibility of the developers to improve the tests and testing tools. When fixing bugs in libvoikko or voikko-fi, new tests should be added to the files under corevoikko/tests/voikkotest (this is not required for vocabulary changes). For libreoffice-voikko new tests should be added to the test document. Changes fixing bugs reported to the tracker must contain a reference to that bug in the commit log message. When closing such bugs, mention the number of the Git revision containing the fix.
There are not yet formal requirements to document the changes or write specifications for new features, but any existing documentation should be updated if you change the documented behaviour.
We aim to store only original source code in our repository. Do not check in anything that is generated (program binaries, source packages, pdf files) or is maintained in another revision control system without asking permission from the mailing list.