Contributing changes to GRUB
The typical experience for a developer in this project is the following:
- You find yourself wanting to do something (e.g. fixing a bug).
- You show some result in the mailing list or the IRC.
- You are getting to be known to other developers.
- You accumulate significant amount of contribution, so copyright assignment is processed.
- You are free to check in your changes by your own, legally speaking.
At this point, it is rather annoying that you ought to ask somebody else every change to be checked in. For efficiency, it is far better, if you can commit it yourself. Therefore, our policy is to give you the write permission to our official repository, once you have shown your skill and will, and the FSF clerks have dealt with your copyright assignment.
As you might know, GRUB is hosted on Savannah, thus the membership is managed by Savannah. This means that, if you want to be a member of this project:
- You need to create your own account on Savannah.
You can submit Request for Inclusion from My Groups on Savannah.
Then, one of the admins can approve your request, and you will be a member. If you don't want to use the Savannah interface to submit a request, you can simply notify the admins by email or something else, alternatively. But you still need to create an account beforehand.
NOTE: we sometimes receive a Request for Inclusion from an unknown person. In this case, the request would be just discarded, since it is too dangerous to allow a stranger to be a member, which automatically gives him a commit right to the repository, both for a legal reason and for a technical reason. If your intention is to get started, please do not submit a request. Instead, please subscribe to the mailing list, and communicate first (e.g. sending a patch, asking a question, commenting on another message...).