# mon /contrib -- guidelines

We encourage mon users to submit their own monitors, graphical front-ends, patches, and other utilities back into the mon community. These utilities are collected here.

This page describes the procedure for getting your contributions in the /contrib tree. We want to encourage submissions, but at the same time, we would like to keep the quality reasonable and have everything reasonably well-documented.

If you are submitting new material to the /contrib tree, you must include the following with each submission:

1. A brief (one paragraph) description of what your submission does.
2. A file containing your submission. If there is only one file (e.g. a self-documented monitor script), then send that. If there are multiple files in your distribution, these must be sent in a compressed tar (.tar.gz) archive.
3. A README file, describing in more detail what your submission does, how to install it, who might find it useful, etc. See sample README files in the /contrib tree for examples of what is needed. In general, the better your README file, the more chance other people will use your software.

If you are submitting a patch to another contrib'ed item, please note the following:

1. Your patch should fix a bug, or add a new piece of functionality, preferably by being backwards compatible. If you need or want to significantly change the way a monitor works, you might consider making a new monitor.
2. Send patches as attached context diffs, noting what is fixed and how.
3. There is absolutely no rule that limits the number of monitors for a particular service, for example, just because there are already 5 different HTTP monitors doesn't mean another one isn't necessary or useful.

Send your submissions via email to trockij@linux.kernel.org.

Submissions not meeting these guidelines may not be accepted.

Last modified: Tue May 22 21:47:42 PDT 2001