Development Workflow

NuttX development workflow is based around contributions submitted in the form of GitHub Pull Requests (PR). This is true both for external contributors and NuttX maintainers, as direct pushes to the repository are not allowed as a general rule. Once submitted, your PR will be reviewed and checked using Continuous Integration (CI) practices.

You should be aware of the following:

All contributions must adhere to the Coding Standard. You can check your files using nxstyle or complete patchsets using checkpatch script (both found in tools subdirectory of NuttX repository). This check will also run automatically during CI to ensure conformance.

Note that not all existing files in the repository are already adapted to conform to the standard as this is an ongoing effort. Thus, if you’re submitting a patch to an existing file you may have to make the file conform to the standard, even if you are not reponsible for those standard violations.

It is also appreciated that you separate any styling fixes in a separate commit from the functional changes so that these are more easily readable during review.

Before starting work on any given non trivial contribution, do subscribe to the mailing list and ask about your idea to avoid wasted effort by going the wrong-route.

If you are submitting an original contribution (you wrote the code yourself from scratch) it will have to be submitted under the terms of the Apache 2.0 License using the corresponding header.

Note that if you are working as an employee in a company, usually copyright belongs to the company and thus this means the company will have to authorize this and submit the appropriate license agreements.

If you are submitting third-party code:

Code from actively developed projects is not accepted to be included in NuttX (i.e.: creating a fork). It is expected that changes required in third-party code for NuttX support are to be implemented in these projects. As an intermediate solution, it is acceptable to include a patch to be applied to this third-party code, which will be pulled during built.

If this is from an inactive project, it may be considered for inclusion in NuttX, provided that licensing terms allow to do so and it is deemed of sufficient value to be included, considering that this code will have to be maintained in NuttX afterwards.

Note that it is undesireable to included non Apache 2.0 Licensed code inside the repository, even if the license itself allows it (for example BSD License).