Respect The Original Style

Please respect the style of the orginal file. Make sure that your additions fit in with that style. The framework has coding conventions and every contribution is supposed to adhere to them. You might find it a little difficult to discover the conventions used by a particular class but if you stick to the style of the original then that'll be fine. If in doubt, ask on the developers mailinglist.

If a patch is submitted which doesn't satisfy the component's coding conventions, then either a committer will need to rewrite the submission or it will be rejected. Getting it right in this first place will save you having to rewrite it.

Most important codestyles:

• don't use vertical alignement
• brackets are on the same line as the method signature
• brackets are on the same line as control statements
• always brackets for control statements
• don't use _ in variablenames

Tabs Not Spaces

PLEASE NO SPACES!

Some IDEs include automatic source (re)formatting. If you use an IDE, please check that this feature is either disabled or set to use tabs.

If a patch is submitted which uses tabs rather than spaces, then either a committer will have to reformat it before it's applied or the patch will be rejected. Again, it's easier to get it right in the first place rather than have to reformat and resubmit your patch.

Test Cases

Classes needs to be tested with PHPUnit. If you are not familiar with the principles of regression testing, then the JUnit or even the PHPUnit site has some good articles.

Before you submit your patch, please do a clean build of the full distribution and run the unit tests (this can be done with maven test . This ensures that your patch doesn't break any existing functionality.

We strongly recommend that you create and submit test cases together with the rest of your contribution. Test cases ensure that bugs stay fixed and features don't get broken. Test cases will probably be needed anyway so submitting them saves time.

Creating A Patch

The Apache Log4PHP source code repository holds the current source. Currently SVN is beeing used.

Please create your patch against the latest revision of the files in the source code repository since this makes the job of applying the patch much easier. If you don't have a version checked out, then check one out. If you have, then please do a fresh update before you make your changes.

The patch should be in unified format. You can create a patch in this format by using:

  svn diff File >> patchfile

Eclipse has some diff features too. Please make sure you have your project as a patch root. Try to give your patch files meaningful names. This makes it easier for developers who need to apply a number of different patches.

Submitting A Patch

There are two ways to go to submit a patch:

• Add the patch as an attachment to a bug report. Log4PHP uses JIRA. Create a new bug report if necessary.
• Mail the JIRA issue number to the dev mailing list. The email subject should describe what the patch does and should be prefixed by [PATCH]. Make sure that it's clear which component the patch is for.