Submitting Patches

Submitting Patches

If you have found (and fixed) a bug in the OpenVAS source code, implemented a change request or added a new feature, you are welcome to send a patch containing your changes to the OpenVAS developers.

To facilitate the inclusion of your changes into the code, please keep in mind the following guidelines:

• If possible, try to send a patch against the latest SVN revision.
• Send your patch as a unified context diff, in the format the GNU diff tool would produce when called with the -u3 parameter. If you are working on a revision you checked out from the SVN repository, the svn diff command will produce the correct output.
• Please detail your changes in the appropriate ChangeLog. This will help other people (especially other developers) to understand what you changed and why you changed it.
• Try to keep your patches atomic. That means that each patch should contain only one feature, bugfix or addition. Please do not submit a patch containing dozens of features as it is highly unlikely that the developers will want to add all your changes simultaneously. Your patch is far more likely to be accepted if you send in a number of small patches instead and leave it at the discretion of the developers to determine the best time to include your changes.

If you have followed these guidelines your patch should now be ready for submission to the OpenVAS project. The best way to do this is to send your patch to the OpenVAS developers mailing list at

with a short explanation as to what you did and why you did it.

Submitting Patches