Contributing to GNU Radio

Welcome! You are reading about how to contribute code to GNU Radio. First of all, we are very happy that you're about to contribute, and welcome your submissions! We hope many more will come.

In this document, we will explain the main things to consider when submitting pull requests against GNU Radio. Reading this first will help a lot with streamlining the process of getting your code merged.

There is also a wiki-based version of this file, which contains more detail. This file is more of a checklist.

New to GNU Radio?

If you're new, it is a good idea to first get acquainted with GNU Radio from a user perspective. https://tutorials.gnuradio.org/ is a good place to start.

What about non-code contributions?

Those are at least as important as code contributions: Emails to the mailing list, answers on Stack Overflow, Wiki page edits, examples... We very much appreciate those. However, this document is specifically about contributing code.

DCO Signed?

Any code contributions going into GNU Radio will become part of a GPL-licensed, open source repository. It is therefore imperative that code submissions belong to the authors, and that submitters have the authority to merge that code into the public GNU Radio codebase.

For that purpose, we use the Developer's Certificate of Origin. It is the same document used by other projects. Signing the DCO states that there are no legal reasons to not merge your code.

To sign the DCO, suffix your git commits with a "Signed-off-by" line. When using the command line, you can use git commit -s to automatically add this line. If there were multiple authors of the code, or other types of stakeholders, make sure that all are listed, each with a separate Signed-off-by line.

Coding Guidelines

We have codified our coding guidelines in GREP1. Please read them, and stick to them. For C++ code, use clang-format. For Python, PEP8 is your friend (but again, check the actual coding guidelines).

Python or C++?

Python is nice, and generally simpler. However, all performance-critical code should be written in C++. The same goes for all blocks, since there are use cases for C++-only GNU Radio.

Git commit messages are very important

We follow standard git commit message guidelines, similar to many other open source projects. See the coding guidelines for more details. In a nutshell:

• Keep the lines below 72 characters
• Subject line has the component prepended (e.g., runtime:)
• Avoid empty git commit messages
• The git commit message explains the change, the code only explains the current state

Include Unit Tests

If you have an obvious test, that might speed up the time it takes to convince reviewers that your code is correct.

GitHub-specific Actions

GNU Radio is currently hosted at GitHub, where we've added some mechanics that help with getting code merged. If you intend to develop code more than once, request being accepted into the gr-devs group. Members of this group can change labels and approve pull requests or request changes.

The Buddy Principle: Submit One, Review One

When you've submitted a pull request, please take the time to review another one. This helps make sure that there are always a number of reviews at least equal to the number of pull requests, which means the maintainers don't get overwhelmed when a lot is being contributed.

Standard command line options

When writing programs that are executable from the command line, please follow existing examples regarding their command line arguments, and reuse them.