Developer Information

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This document contains various information for developers or anyone interested in contributing to NetSurf.

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Last updated 11 November 2007

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Source control

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The source is kept in a Subversion repository. To check the source out use the command:

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$ svn checkout svn://svn.netsurf-browser.org/trunk/netsurf

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You can also browse the source via the web interface.

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Recent changes can be seen on the development page. An an RSS feed of recent changes is also provided by CIA. All checkins are reported on the Commits mailing list.

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Contact James to get write access to the SVN repository.

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Compiling

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The recommended compiler is GCC. A guide to building NetSurf on RISC OS is available, as are instructions for building the GTK version. NetSurf can also be cross-compiled for RISC OS using GCCSDK.

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The autobuilder compiles NetSurf every 15 minutes if changes have been checked into SVN.

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A debug version of NetSurf can be built. This is command-line only and does not include any GUI code. It runs natively on Linux so can be debugged and checked using gdb, efence, valgrind, etc.

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Dependencies

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In addition to the compiler, NetSurf requires a number of additional tools to be available. These are enumerated below. Additionally, the libraries which NetSurf uses are also listed

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Tools

Lemon parser generator (http://www.hwaci.com/sw/lemon/)
re2c lexer (http://re2c.org/)

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Libraries

cAres & cURL (http://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/)
IJG JPEG library (http://www.ijg.org/)
MNG decoding library (http://www.libmng.com/)
OpenSSL (http://www.openssl.org/)
libXML 2 (http://www.xmlsoft.org/)
Zlib (http://www.zlib.org)

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RISC OS specific libraries

OSLib 6.80 or later (http://ro-oslib.sourceforge.net/)
Pencil (http://source.netsurf-browser.org/trunk/pencil/)
RUfl (http://zamez.org/rufl)

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Source documentation

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See the Docs directory for source code documentation. Our pictorial Style Guide (single-page PDF) shows our code style.

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Communication

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The main method of communication between the developers is the #netsurf IRC channel.

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The developers' mailing list is also used for less transient communication.

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Translations

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Translations of NetSurf to other languages are welcome. No programming knowledge is required, just the ability to use a template editor and a text editor. Please see the translations page for more information.

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