INFORMATION FOR CONTRIBUTORS
============================

Unison is a part-time project for its developers: we work on it
because we enjoy making something useful for us and for the community,
but we all have other jobs to do.  If you like Unison and you want to
help us make it better, we'd be glad to have you on the team!

    
HOW YOU CAN HELP
----------------

There are lots of ways...

    * Telling us how you like Unison, whether the installation went
      smoothly, and what you use it for.
    * Submitting bug reports (we're always glad to have these...)
    * Submitting bug FIXES (... especially when accompanied by these! :-)
    * Reading the code.  One of Unison's main design goals is robustness.  
      Help us reach that goal by reading our code and seeing whether you
      understand and believe it.
    * Proposing ideas for new functionality.
    * Undertaking serious development work.

See the file TODO.txt for a "wish list" of improvements that are waiting
for someone to take them on.


DOWNLOADING THE DEVELOPER SOURCES
---------------------------------

If you just want to read the code, then the source distribution has
everything you need.

If you want to do any serious hacking on Unison, you should begin by
grabbing a copy of the full distribution from here:

     http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/resources/developers-only

The tar file you'll find contains a mirror of our whole source tree
(including the sources for the documentation, various small tools,
working notes, etc.).  It is copied every night from our central
repository, so it is not guaranteed to be consistent, working,
compilable, etc.


SUBMITTING CHANGES
------------------

If you've made a change that you're happy with and think ought to
become part of a future release of Unison, you can send it to us like
this: 

    cd <top of your unison directory tree>
    make submit

This will tar up the whole tree and mail it off to us, so that we can
play with it, compare it to what's in the repository, and easily
commit the changes.


FINDING YOUR WAY AROUND
-----------------------

See the file ROADMAP.txt for some suggestions on how to start reading
the sources.

