Group: LibreDWG

Welcome the GNU LibreDWG hackers' wiki. For general information about the project, please check the official website.

This wiki is mainly intended to help developers or advanced users checkout the latest source code, compile, test, modify and submit changes to LibreDWG. Feel free to contribute to this page. If you are creating a new page, please put it under the LibreDWG tree, eg. http://groups.fsf.org/wiki/LibreDWG/Testing.

LibreDWG's source code and administrative tools (mailing lists, bug, patch and support trackers) are hosted at Savannah.

There is no binary release yet. Therefore, anyone who wants to use or test LibreDWG will have to checkout and build.

Checking out

The source code is hosted in a git repository. Check out git's website if you don't know what git is. To check out as an anonymous user:

git clone git://git.sv.gnu.org/libredwg.git

Building

You need basic development tools and pslib to compile libredwg. In debian-like distributions, install the build-essential and pslib-dev packages. Cd to the libredwg folder created by git, and type:

./configure
make
sudo make install
make check

If you get any errors, please contact us through the mailing list.

If you want to build under an OS made in Redmond, check LibreDWG/BuildingWithCygwin

Testing

LibreDWG comes with several examples (under the examples folder) that can be used for testing purposes. The most advanced example is testSVG.

cd examples
./testSVG yourdwgfile.dwg > yourconverteddwgfile.svg

If you get any errors (specially segfaults) and want to submit a bug, please attach a file with your output. To redirect all output, including stderr to a file:

./testSVG yourdwgfile.dwg 2&> test.out

If possible, add a link to the tested DWG file to the submission. We can't do much if we can't access the file. Don't attach DWG files to the submission, specially if you don't have copy rights over them.

Hacking and submitting changes

You are welcome to get your hands dirty and put down some code. Although, you should be aware of some details:

• Try to follow the GNU Coding Standards. (quick hack: if you're using Eclipse use the GNU identation style. Other editors might have this feature too.)
• Be aware that the copyright over your work will be assinged to the Free Software Foundation. We have decided this because the FSF will enforce the GPL for the program if someone violates it, and will act juridically if necessary. Although, you still get the credit for your work.
• You'll probably need to understand the internals of the DWG format. The Open Design Alliance provides a reverse-engineered DWG specification.

Please be sure to work on the latest revision. Run git pull from time to time and before generating patches.

After your changes are done and well tested, generate a patch with format-patch (check git documentation if you don't know how to do it) and submit it to the patch tracker.

Git push access

We want contributors, and we believe that giving them write access to the git repository means we trust their work and we want them in our team. Therefore, we have a slightly liberal write access policy: if you submit two non-trivial patches and they get accepted, you're in. As stated above, we've assigned the copyright to the Free Software Foundation. So, in order to become an official developer, you'll have to fill the following form and mail it to fsf-records@gnu.org and please carbon copy (CC) libredwg-owner@gnu.org:

Please email the following information to fsf-records@gnu.org, and we
will send you the assignment form for your past and future changes.
Please use your full name as the subject line of the message.


[What is the name of the program or package you're contributing to?]
LibreDWG

[Did you copy any files or text written by someone else in these changes?
Even if that material is free software, we need to know about it.]


[Do you have an employer who might have a basis to claim to own
your changes?  Do you attend a school which might make such a claim?]


[For the copyright registration, what country are you a citizen of?]


[What year were you born?]


[Please write your email address here.]


[Please write your snail address here.]

[Which files have you changed so far, and which new files have you written
so far?]

Talking to us

If you just want to ask a question or give us some ideas, feel free to write to or join the developers' mailing list.

If you just want to be updated about LibreDWG news, join the low traffic announcements mailing list.

Follow the identi.ca group for instant updates.

Follow the news atom feed for important announcements.

Some of the developers also hang out at #libredwg on irc.freenode.net, just drop by and say hello.

Happy Hacking!