# NAME

contrib - Contribution Guidelines for MRTG

# DESCRIPTION

If you have written an extension to mrtg or created a bug fix, please consider contributing it to the project. As I get quite a number of contributions every week, here are a few guidelines which explain how to contribute so that I can use the contribution without too much additional work.

# TRANSLATIONS

MRTG messages have been translated to a number of languages but there are still many which have not been covered yet. If you want to add yours, go into the mrtg-2.10.9/translate directory and follow the instructions given in the README file.

# DOCUMENTATION

All documentation of mrtg is done with the perl POD system. If you want to learn about it, type

     perldoc perlpod

and read the instructions. If you have bugfixes or additions to the existing documents, make sure you modify the POD files and not the html or txt versions.

# PATCHES

When you have created your modification or extension to mrtg and want to submit it to me, please crate a patch for the files which you have modified. Do not send entire files unless they are new.

To create a patch, get hold of a copy of GNU diff (Many Unix systems will have this installed already. In the NT world you might want to get http://sources.redhat.com/cygwin/ to get all the nice GNU tools available.) and type

     diff --unified --ignore-space-change old-file new-file > simple.patch

or if you have modified several files do

     diff --recursive --unified --ignore-space-change old-dir/ new-dir/ >long.patch

# DOCUMENTATION

I take documentation very seriously. Whenever you create a new feature for mrtg which you want to get included in the official release, your patch must also contain modifications for the relevant pod file in the doc tree or for the documentation sections of cfgmaker and indexmaker.

# ADDRESS

Send your patches, translations and contributions to Tobias Oetiker <oetiker@ee.ethz.ch>

# AUTHOR

Tobias Oetiker <oetiker@ee.ethz.ch>