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Contribute

How can I contribute ?

You can start by promoting digiKam to your friends and colleagues by showing them how powerful digiKam is :)

You are also welcome to strongly test all digiKam features and to report bugs, see below.

Subscribing to digiKam-users and helping newbies is also a good way to increase the number of digiKam users !

If you are new to the free software world, we recommend to take a look at this article which summarizes they way open source projects work very well

Reporting bugs and wishes
Please use the KDE bug tracking system for all bugreports and new feature wishlists. Take a care to use the right component to post a new file at the right place. You can checkout the current bugreports and wishlists at these urls:
digiKam also uses external libraries to manage metadata (Exiv2) and digital camera (GPhoto). Please use links listed below to reports specifics bugs relevant of these libraries:

If you are experiencing crashes with digiKam

If you found a context to crash digiKam, you can provide a backtrace using GDB debugger. digiKam needs to be compiled with all debug info else the backtrace will not suitable. There is a configure option for that: 
# make -f Makefile.cvs
# ./configure --enable-debug=full
# make
# su
# make install.

To make a backtrace with GDB use following command: 
# gdb digikam
> run
> ...
> _crash here_
> ...
> bt
> _the backtrace is here_
> quit

For a detailed and very helpful guide on providing useful crash reports see this guide
.

For memory leaks


To check any memory leak problem in digiKam, valgrind is your friend (http://valgrind.org) Try this command line to use with valgrind : 

valgrind --tool=memcheck --leak-check=full --error-limit=no digikam

Submitting patches

You are welcome to propose patches. But, please read the HACKING file first.
Send patches against the current version of the code (latest svn revision), not the stable release or an old beta version. Patches can be created with : 

svn diff > diff.patch

Translation

If you want to contribute to the digiKam internationalization effort, you need to contact directly the KDE translation teams at http://l10n.kde.org/.
You can start by reading the KDE Translation HOWTO.

Documentation

Help to our excellent documentation is always welcome. For all matters concerning it, write to gerhard at kulzer dot net. Our documentation is established in docbook format (KDE standard, a must reading). This README file explains in more detail how to do structure the documents, how to do screenshots, compress them and so on.

Even small additions/changes in ASCII format are possible, and should be sent to gerhard_at_kulzer_dot_net so that they can be incorporated in the docbook.

Pictures samples

We need some sample files produced by recent digital cameras, especially RAW and JPEG files from different manufacturers (like Canon, Nikon, Sony, Olympus, Sigma and so on).
With these files, we'll be able to look at metadatas (Marker-Notes) embedded in the files to improve their support in digiKam (via the exiv2 library).

We also need sample files produced by all kind of applications (including other OS and proprietary softwares like photoshop) that include IPTC/XMP metadata. It's to ensure compatibility with other tools and to test the new automatic import of these datas in the digiKam database (comments and tags update and so on).


Mailing lists Subscribtions

Thanks to Gmane, these mailing lists are accessible with news interface (NNTP protocol) as well. Gmane not only provides a two way mail to news interface, but let you read (browse and search) the mail archives with Web interface.