Contributing

The xml-coreutils are open source, and are licensed under the GNU General Public License (version 3 or later). There are several ways you can contribute (thank you!), if you wish:

Mailing list

There's a mailing list for discussions, help, criticisms, and bug reports. The mailing list archive is here.

RPMs and DEBs

There are no prebuilt RPMs or DEBs for xml-coreutils at this time. To build your own RPM package, a simple SPEC file is available here.

Hacking

If you'd like to start hacking the code, you should probably first go to the src directory and look for the files xml-strings.c and xml-wc.c, which are the simplest to understand. The xml-coreutils rely on the expat library for parsing XML input. The function stdparse() handles parsing for most commands, and is defined in stdparse.c. You might wish to read the informal design_requirements.txt which can be found in the doc directory.

There is a simple testing framework in the src/test directory. Each test file (sometest.testin) contains three important pieces: an INPUT file, a COMMAND line and an OUTPUT file. This is converted by compile_test.sh into a test script (sometest.sh). The test script runs the command "cat INPUT | COMMAND" and compares its STDOUT with OUTPUT. The test is successful if STDOUT and OUTPUT are identical. The command "make check" is used to run all the tests. Now go read the *.testin files.

Code patches

A list of available patches is here.

You can submit code patches to the mailing list. If you don't know how to make a patch, here's an example:

First download an official tarball, let's say xml-coreutils-0.8.tar.gz, and extract it to your working directory. You should rename the extracted directory to make it easier to identify.

% tar xfz xml-coreutils-0.8.tar.gz
% mv xml-coreutils-0.8 xml-coreutils-0.8xyz
% cd xml-coreutils-0.8xyz

Now edit files, compile, debug, etc. When you're ready to create the patch, do the following:

% cd ..
% tar xfz xml-coreutils-0.8.tar.gz

This will create a new ("official") xml-coreutils-0.8 directory beside your modified xml-coreutils-0.8xyz (that's why you renamed it earlier).

% diff -Naur xml-coreutils-0.8 xml-coreutils-0.8xyz > xyz.patch

The above command has created the patch file xyz.patch, which contains everything needed to convert the official xml-coreutils-0.8 source tree into your own xml-coreutils-0.8xyz tree.

When you chare the patch file with others, tell them which official tarball you used (xml-coreutils-0.8.tar.gz here). Then they can dowload it, and type:

% tar xfz xml-coreutils-0.8.tar.gz
% cd xml-coreutils-0.8
% patch -Np1 < ../xyz.patch

Now the xml-coreutils-0.8 source tree is identical with the original xml-coreutils-0.8xyz tree (but note the directory name is xml-coreutils-0.8 not xml-coreutils-0.8xyz).

If patch prints out errors then most likely the wrong official tarball was downloaded.