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<h3 class="section">D.4 General Guidelines</h3>
<p>All Octave's sources are distributed under the General Public License
(GPL). Currently, Octave uses GPL version 3. For details about this
license, see <a href="http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html">http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html</a>. Therefore,
whenever you create a new source file, it should have the following
comment header (use appropriate year, name and comment marks):
<pre class="example"> ## Copyright (C) 1996-2012 John W. Eaton <jwe@octave.org>
##
## This file is part of Octave.
##
## Octave is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
## modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public
## License as published by the Free Software Foundation;
## either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any
## later version.
##
## Octave is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
## but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied
## warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR
## PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more
## details.
##
## You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public
## License along with Octave; see the file COPYING. If not,
## see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
</pre>
<p>Always include commit messages in changesets. After making your source
changes, record and briefly describe the changes in your commit message.
You should have previously configured your <samp><span class="file">.hgrc</span></samp> (or
<samp><span class="file">Mercurial.ini</span></samp> on Windows) with your name and email, which will
get automatically added to your commit message. Your commit message
should have a brief one-line explanation of what the commit does. If you
are patching a bug, this one-line explanation should mention the bug
number at the end. If your change is small and only touches one file,
this is typically sufficient. If you are modifying several files or
several parts of one file, you should enumerate your changes roughly
following the GNU coding standards on changelogs, like the following
example:
<pre class="example"> look for methods before constructors
* symtab.cc (symbol_table::fcn_info::fcn_info_rep::find):
Look for class methods before constructors, contrary to <span class="sc">matlab</span>
documentation.
* test/ctor-vs-method: New directory of test classes.
* test/test_ctor_vs_method.m: New file.
* test/Makefile.am: Include ctor-vs-method/module.mk.
(FCN_FILES): Include test_ctor_vs_method.m in the list.
</pre>
<p class="noindent">In this example, the names of files is mentioned, and in parentheses the
name of the function in that file that was modified. There is no need to
mention the function for m-files that only contain one function. The
commit message should describe what is changed, not why. Any explanation
of why a change is needed should appear as comments in the code,
particularly if there is something that might not be obvious to someone
reading it later.
<p>When submitting code which addresses a known bug on the Octave bug
tracker (<a href="http://bugs.octave.org">http://bugs.octave.org</a>), please add '(bug #XXXXX)' to the
first line of the commit messages. For example:
<pre class="example"> Fix bug for complex input for gradient (bug #34292).
</pre>
<p>The preferred comment mark for places that may need further attention is
FIXME.
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