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How to contribute to Flawfinder
We love contributions! Here's how to do them in a way that will make everyone's lives easy.
Flawfinder has long been maintained on SourceForge. We now support reporting and changes using either SourceForge or GitHub.
Reporting
For normal problems, bugs, and feature requests, except for vulnerabilities, please file a GitHub issue or SourceForge ticket.
If you find a vulnerability, please separately send a private email to David A. Wheeler. To maintain confidentiality, please use an email system that implements STARTTLS hop-by-hop email encryption on outgoing email (many do, including Gmail, hotmail.com, live.com, outlook.com, and runbox.com). For more about STARTTLS, see the EFF's STARTTLS Everywhere project. We plan to handle vulnerabilities separately, fixing them and then telling the world. We will gladly provide credit to vulnerability reporters (unless you don't want the credit). We've never had a vulnerability report, so this is theoretical at this time.
Change process
We use "git" to track changes. To propose a change, create a fork (copy) of the repository, make your changes, and create a GitHub pull request or SourceForge merge request (they are the same thing).
If you're not familiar with the process, here's some documentation for GitHub and SourceForge.
License and DCO
All proposed changes must be released under at least the project license, in this case the GNU GPL version 2 or later (GPL-2.0+).
Proposers must agree to the Developer's Certificate of Origin, aka DCO. The DCO basically says that you assert that you're legally allowed to provide the commit. Please include in your commit a statement of the form to confirm this ("git commit -s" will do this):
Signed-off-by: Your-name <your-email-address>
You must include the DCO in your first commit proposal. If you forget occasionally, we'll assume that you just forgot, but please try to not forget.
Development environment setup
As always, if you're modifying the software, you'll need to have your development environment set up. You need:
- make
- python2 (invocable as "python2")
- python3 (invocable as "python3")
- pylint (see below)
An easy way to install pylint is to use pip. Most python installs have pip, but if yours does not (e.g., Cygwin), install pip with:
python -m ensurepip
You may want to upgrade pip with:
pip install --upgrade pip
Finally, you can actually install pylint using:
pip install pylint
Code Conventions
To make the program easy to install everywhere, the main executable is exactly one self-contained file. That involves some compromises, but for now, please keep it that way.
We generally use the code conventions of PEP 8. The Python code uses 4-space indents (we used to use 2-space indents). Do not use tabs. In some cases the code doesn't yet comply; patches to improve that are often welcome.
The code must run on both Python 2.7 and Python 3. To check that it works on both, run:
make check
We use "pylint" to check for style and other generic quality problems. To check that the code passes these quality tests, run:
make pylint
We require that the pylint results for contributions be at least 9.5/10 as configured with the provided "pylintrc" file, without any errors ("E"). Better is better. The current version does cause some pylint reports (patches to fix those are welcome!). Note that we configure pylint with the included "pylintrc" file. We intentionally disable some checks as being "less important", for example, the current code has many lines longer than 80 characters. That said, patches to make lines fit in 80 characters are welcome.
Tests
Make sure that your code passes the automated tests. As noted above, invoke tests with "make check", which tests the code using both Python2 and Python3.
It's our policy that as major new functionality is added to the software produced by the project, tests of that functionality should be added to the automated test suite.
Other
Project documentation tends to be in markdown (.md) format. We use "~~~~" so that it's easy to cut-and-paste commands if desired. The main document is a man page, which is then converted to PDF.
Avoid trailing space or tab on a line in source files - those can create hard-to-understand "differences" on lines.
We have earned a CII Best Practices Badge... make sure we keep it!