How to 'dev'

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This page will continue to be updated with development-related information... thanks for your interest :)

This page serves as the official introduction on how to collaborate with our community and help to improve Funtoo Linux.

Introduction

Thanks for your interest in helping out with Funtoo Linux! Funtoo Linux has existed for several years, and we've been using git since the beginning of the project, but have played with various approaches on how to develop Funtoo Linux in a collaborative fashion. Some approaches have worked, some haven't, and I (Daniel) and others like to periodically experiment with different approaches, so these methods are likely to change in the future.

How to Develop -- The Quick Summary

Okay, so you want to get involved. How do you do it? Well, here's how we want you to start:

First, you need to actually use Funtoo Linux in some capacity.
Create a Funtoo account
Help in the forums.
Find things that need fixing on the bug tracker, and submit fixes for them.
If you have a new ebuild, then create an issue on the bug tracker for it.
Testing things and finding bugs is also a form of help.
Help us document stuff on the wiki. See How to 'wiki'.
Hang out in #funtoo on freenode and chat with us.
Learn more about ebuilds by reading our Developer Guide. Ask questions.
Compare Forked Packages To Gentoo, find one that needs updating, and ask us how to help.

If you start doing a good amount of this, you will get noticed and plugged in to our development efforts in a short amount of time.

Now that you have the big picture, let's start by doing a quick overview of Funtoo infrastructure and how it (currently) relates to Funtoo Linux development.

bugs.funtoo.org

Currently, bugs.funtoo.org serves as the center of operations for all development. If you're going to collaborate with us, then you should definitely Create a Funtoo account and familiarize yourself with our bug tracker. We try to ensure that all work in Funtoo Linux has a corresponding issue opened on the bug tracker, so there is some reference for someone to look to find out why some change was made.

The Wiki

You are currently reading the wiki, and it is becoming a more and more important part of development. We currently have the ability to define wiki pages for Ebuilds, which are used as official documentation for the ebuild. Documentation is a very important part of Funtoo Linux development, and you're strongly encouraged to read about Adding an Ebuild to the Wiki. Developers who write good documentation gain much respect :)

git.funtoo.org

All of our master git repositories exist on git.funtoo.org.

GitHub

We have mirrors of all our git repositories on GitHub. When we push to a repository on git.funtoo.org, it automatically pushes the change to the corresponding repo on GitHub, too.

This has historically created some confusion, because we don't really (right now) do active development on GitHub, using pull requests. If you have an improvement to Funtoo Linux, we want you to open a bug on our bug tracker. However, I am hoping that this will change - see FL-1322. But for now, if you create an issue or a pull request on GitHub, we probably won't see it in a timely manner.

The Git Repositories Themselves

One important thing to understand about Funtoo Linux is that the git tree you receive when you type emerge --sync is what I call a transport tree -- it is used to deliver updates to you, but it is not used for development. This tree can be seen at http://git.funtoo.org/ports-2012/tree or http://github.com/funtoo/ports-2012 and is generated using automated scripts which take the Gentoo Portage tree, various funtoo overlays, and several other overlays and combine them into a unified tree. We generate an updated commit for our transport tree every 4 hours.

Development Trees

The repositories that we actually do development in are:

funtoo-overlay is where nearly all of the core Funtoo forked ebuilds live. This tree is maintained by senior Funtoo staff and the BDFL, and also contains stuff like our Funtoo 1.0 Profile system, and the actual scripts that are used to generate our main "transport" tree that users receive.

The Funtoo LDAP and GNOME overlays are examples of development trees where Funtoo staff have collected a bunch of ebuilds that were cluttering up funtoo-overlay, and placed them in their own repository to improve organization. These are treated as extensions of funtoo-overlay.

The Plex overlay and DeaDBeeF overlays are examples of overlays that are maintained by independent developers, and these overlays are hosted in these developers' GitHub accounts. We have added these overlays to our merge script, so any updates made to these GitHub repositories are automatically pulled into our transport tree.

So as you can see, there is quite a bit of flexiblity in how updates can be added to our tree. Senior staff can work on the funtoo-overlay, others can work on the more independent GNOME and LDAP overlays, and (mostly) independent developers can happily maintain ebuilds in their own independent overlays, hosted on GitHub.

How to Dev