Support
*******

Getting Help
============

A mailing list where users may help each other exists, and you can reach it by sending e-mail to gnutls-help@gnutls.org.  Archives of the mailing list discussions, and an interface to manage subscriptions, is available through the World Wide Web at https://lists.gnutls.org/pipermail/gnutls-help/.

A mailing list for developers are also available, see https://www.gnutls.org/lists.html. Bug reports should be sent to bugs@gnutls.org, see Bug Reports.

Commercial Support
==================

Commercial support is available for users of GnuTLS. See https://www.gnutls.org/commercial.html for more information.

Bug Reports
===========

If you think you have found a bug in GnuTLS, please investigate it and report it.

  * Please make sure that the bug is really in GnuTLS, and preferably also check that it hasn't already been fixed in the latest version.

  * You have to send us a test case that makes it possible for us to reproduce the bug.

  * You also have to explain what is wrong; if you get a crash, or if the results printed are not good and in that case, in what way. Make sure that the bug report includes all information you would need to fix this kind of bug for someone else.

Please make an effort to produce a self-contained report, with something definite that can be tested or debugged.  Vague queries or piecemeal messages are difficult to act on and don't help the development effort.

If your bug report is good, we will do our best to help you to get a corrected version of the software; if the bug report is poor, we won't do anything about it (apart from asking you to send better bug reports).

If you think something in this manual is unclear, or downright incorrect, or if the language needs to be improved, please also send a note.

Send your bug report to:

bugs@gnutls.org

Contributing
============

If you want to submit a patch for inclusion -- from solving a typo you discovered, up to adding support for a new feature -- you should submit it as a bug report, using the process in Bug Reports.  There are some things that you can do to increase the chances for it to be included in the official package.

Unless your patch is very small (say, under 10 lines) we require that you assign the copyright of your work to the Free Software Foundation. This is to protect the freedom of the project.  If you have not already signed papers, we will send you the necessary information when you submit your contribution.

For contributions that doesn't consist of actual programming code, the only guidelines are common sense. For code contributions, a number of style guides will help you:

  * Coding Style. Follow the Linux kernel coding style (see https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/coding-style.html.).

     If you normally code using another coding standard, there is no problem, but you should run the indent-gnutls script found in the devel directory to reformat the code before submitting your work.

  * Use the unified diff format diff -u.

  * Return errors. No reason whatsoever should abort the execution of the library.  Even memory allocation errors, e.g. when malloc return NULL, should work although result in an error code.

  * Design with thread safety in mind. Don't use global variables.  Don't even write to per-handle global variables unless the documented behaviour of the function you write is to write to the per-handle global variable.

  * Avoid using the C math library. It causes problems for embedded implementations, and in most situations it is very easy to avoid using it.

  * Document your functions. Use comments before each function headers, that, if properly formatted, are extracted into Texinfo manuals and GTK-DOC web pages.

  * Supply a ChangeLog and NEWS entries, where appropriate.

Certification
=============

There are certifications from national or international bodies which "prove" to an auditor that the crypto component follows some best practices, such as unit testing and reliance on well known crypto primitives.

GnuTLS has support for the FIPS 140-2 certification under Red Hat Enterprise Linux. See FIPS140-2 mode for more information.