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+
+                        Contributing to Emacs
+
+Emacs is a collaborative project and one which wants to encourage new
+development.  You may wish to fix Emacs bugs, improve testing, port
+Emacs to a new platform, update documentation, add new Emacs features,
+and the like.  To help with this, there is a lot of documentation
+available.  In addition to the user guide and Lisp Reference Manual in
+the Emacs distribution, the Emacs web pages also contain much
+information.
+
+You may also want to submit your change so that can be considered for
+conclusion in a future version of Emacs (see below).
+
+If you don't feel up to hacking Emacs, there are still plenty of ways to
+help!  You can answer questions on the mailing lists, write
+documentation, find bugs, create a Emacs related website (contribute to
+the official Emacs web site), or create a Emacs related software
+package.  We welcome all of the above and feel free to ask on the Emacs
+mailing lists if you are looking for feedback or for people to review a
+work in progress.
+
+Ref: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/
+
+Finally, there are certain legal requirements and style issues which
+all contributors need to be aware of.
+
+o       Coding Standards
+
+        All contributions must conform to the GNU Coding Standard.
+        Submissions which do not conform to the standards will be
+        returned with a request to reformat the changes.
+
+        Emacs has certain additional coding requirements.
+
+        Ref: http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards_toc.html
+
+
+o       Copyright Assignment
+
+        Before we can accept code contributions from you, we need a
+        copyright assignment form filled out and filed with the FSF.
+
+        See some documentation by the FSF for details and contact us
+        via the Emacs mailing list to obtain the relevant
+        forms.
+
+        Small changes can be accepted without a copyright assignment
+        form on file.
+
+        Ref: http://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain.html#SEC6
+
+
+o       Getting the Source Code
+
+        The latest version of Emacs can be downloaded using CVS or Arch
+        from the Savannah web site.  It is important that you submit
+        your patch using this version, as any bug in a released version
+        of Emacs may already be fixed.  It also makes it easier for
+        others to test your patch,
+        
+        Ref: http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/emacs
+
+
+o       Submitting Patches
+
+        Every patch must have several pieces of information before we
+        can properly evaluate it.
+
+        For bug fixes, a description of the bug and how your patch fixes
+        this bug.
+
+        For new features, a description of the feature and your
+        implementation.
+
+        A ChangeLog entry as plaintext (separate from the patch); see
+        the various ChangeLog files for format and content. Note that,
+        unlike some other projects, we do require ChangeLogs also for
+        documentation (i.e., .texi files).
+
+        The patch itself. If you are accessing the CVS repository use
+        "cvs update; cvs diff -cp"; else, use "diff -cp OLD NEW" or
+        "diff -up OLD NEW". If your version of diff does not support
+        these options, then get the latest version of GNU diff.
+
+        We accept patches as plain text (preferred for the compilers
+        themselves), MIME attachments (preferred for the web pages),
+        or as uuencoded gzipped text.
+
+        When you have all these pieces, bundle them up in a mail message
+        and send it to emacs-pretest-bug@gnu.org or emacs-devel@gnu.org.
+        All patches and related discussion should be sent to the
+        emacs-pretest-bug mailinglist. 
+
+
+o       Please read your patch before submitting it.
+
+        A patch containing several unrelated changes or
+        arbitrary reformats will be returned with a request
+        to re-formatting / split it.
+        
+
+o       Supplemental information for Emacs Developers:
+
+        If you wish to contribute to Emacs on a regular basis then
+        you may be given write access to the CVS repository.
+        
+        Discussion about Emacs development takes place on
+        emacs-devel@gnu.org.
+
+        Think carefully about whether your change requires updating the
+        documentation.  If it does, you can either do this yourself or
+        add an item to the NEWS file.
+
+        The best way to understand Emacs Internals is to read the code
+        but there is also a node "GNU Emacs Internals" in the Appendix
+        of the Emacs Lisp Reference Manual that may help.
+
+        The file DEBUG describes how to debug Emacs.
+
+        Avoid using `defadvice' or `eval-after-load' for lisp
+        code to be included in Emacs.