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Contents 1 Contributing to Monty Program Ab 1.1 Getting Started 1.2 Contributing Code 1.3 Criteria For Contributions

Contributing to Monty Program Ab

The success of MariaDB depends on the participation of the community.

There are several ways to contribute, and not all of them require strong C/C++ skills. Areas include:

• Code (bug fixes and new features)
• Bug Reports
• Feature Suggestions
• Testing and Benchmarking
  • Bug tests can be uploaded to the 'private' directory of our FTP server.
• Documentation
• Advocating MariaDB in your area
• Run a BuildBot on a platform which is not currently represented

Getting Started

The following pages will help you get up and running with the MariaDB source code:

• Getting the MariaDB Source Code
• Setting up your development environment
• Building MariaDB

Contributing Code

There are several reasons why contributing code is the easiest and most rewarding way to contribute to MariaDB:

1. We are very responsive toward reviews of submitted code and as soon as the review is done, the submitted code is merged into an existing MariaDB tree and made available to everyone, not just select customers.
2. Code reviews are performed by the MariaDB core development team and the quality, detail, and timeliness of our reviews are better than you will find elsewhere.
3. With MariaDB everyone has access to the latest code.
4. If a patch is very safe and/or very useful we are willing to push it into the stable code (as long as it can't break any existing applications). We are willing to do this to ensure the freedom to add small, needed fixes on a stable release so users don't have to wait a year for something to be added which is critical to their business.
5. If you are an active contributor, you can become a member of maria-captains, even if you aren't working for Monty Program Ab. All captains have the same rights as any other captain to accept and reject patches. Our development model is truly open for everyone.

See the Contributing Code page for some of the nuts and bolts of contributing to MariaDB.

Criteria For Contributions

• The code is nice, modular, performant, easy to read, and believed to be bug free.
• It has been properly reviewed by at least one maria-captain.
• It follows the MariaDB coding standards.
• It doesn't contain duplicated code / features that we already have.
• It provides a new valuable addition to the MariaDB server that benefit a large number of users.
• It doesn't break anything for old MySQL / MariaDB users.
• It will not stop anyone from implementing another important feature.
• The developer/company will ensure that the code will be supported for the foreseeable future (either by doing itself or contracting someone to do that).
• In general, Monty Program Ab needs to get a shared ownership of the code that is included in the MariaDB distribution. The currently known exceptions to this rule are storage engines and code that is loadable through a plugin. For these, it's enough that the code is GPL.