When contributing to the Mono project, please follow the Mono Coding Guidelines. We have been using a coding style for many years, please make your patches conform to these guidelines.
In general, we do not accept patches that merely shuffle code around, split classes in multiple files, reindent the code or are the result of running a refactoring tool on the source code. This is done for three reasons: (a) we have our own coding guidelines; (b) Some modules are imported from upstream sources and we want to respect their coding guidelines and (c) it destroys valuable history that is often used to investigate bugs, regressions and problems.
The Mono project uses the MIT X11, GNU LGPL version 2 and the Apache License 2.0. We also imported some Microsoft code licensed under the open source Microsoft Public License.
Different parts of Mono use different licenses. The actual details of which licenses are used for which parts are detailed on the LICENSE file in this directory.
When contributing code, make sure that your contribution falls under the appropriate license. For example, contributions to code licensed under MIT/X11 code, should be MIT/X11 code.
The runtime (mono/...) is a special case. The code is dual-licensed
by Xamarin under both the GNU LGPL v2 license and is also available
under commercial terms. For the runtime, you should either sign an
agreement that grants Xamarin the rights to relicense your code under
other licenses other than the LGPL v2 or your contribution must be
made as an MIT/X11 license which grants us the same rights, but
involves no paperwork. For the latter case, please specify on your
commit(s) that you are licensing the changes under MIT/X11.
For other parts of the project that are dual-licensed, please state on your commit(s) what license you are contributing the changes under.
Pull requests go through testing on our Jenkins server. We will usually only merge a pull request if it causes no regressions in a test run there.
When you submit a pull request, one of two things happens:
- If you are a new contributor, Jenkins will ask for permissions (on the pull request) to test it. A maintainer will reply to approve the test run if they find the patch appropriate. After you have submitted a few patches, a maintainer will whitelist you so that all of your future pull requests are tested automatically.
- If you are a well-known, whitelisted contributor, Jenkins will go ahead and test your pull request as soon as a test machine is available.
When your pull request has been built, Jenkins will update the build status of your pull request. If it succeeded and we like the changes, a maintainer will likely merge it. Otherwise, you can amend your pull request to fix build breakage and Jenkins will test it again.
Occasionally, a pull request sits for several months without any response from the author. This isn't necessarily an issue, but we may sometimes decide to close pull requests that have not seen any progress for a long time. This is in interest of keeping the pull request list clean so that other pull requests don't get lost in the clutter.
If we do close your pull request due to inactivity, you're more than welcome to submit it anew after you address any comments or issues that were brought up on the original pull request.