There are ways of contributing to eCos development which involve very little effort. Providing constructive comments on any part of the system, including the documentation and the web site, helps us to identify areas which need improvement. Reporting a problem gives us a chance to fix it, especially if you provide us with a simple test case and sufficient information to reproduce the problem. Participation in the discussions in the ecos-discuss mailing list gives us a better understanding of the user community, and perhaps some new ideas.

If you wish to contribute to the actual code there are multiple levels of involvement. You can write a new package. This could be a HAL package as part of a port of the system to new hardware. It could be a device driver. It could provide some new functionality such as a graphics library. It could be a port of some existing software that is appropriate for embedded systems. You can enhance an existing package, for example the eCos kernel. If you find a bug in the system then you can provide a patch that fixes it. You may also find a way to rewrite some existing code so that it becomes more efficient and/or needs less memory. You may add new functionality. Contributions to the documentation and to the test suites are particularly welcome, since these areas are often overlooked by contributors.

All patches should be submitted by creating a new Bugzilla report, setting the Component field to Patches and contributions. Discussion of the patch may take place there, and indeed an eCos maintainer may advise you of any mistakes in the patch, or any other reason why the patch may not be included in eCos. For non-trivial patches to the core system we generally require a copyright assignment.