This chapter provides a consolidated overview of all of the information needed to begin making source code contributions to Cygwin/X. Creating a source code contribution for Cygwin/X requires an amazingly small amount of information; however, prior to this document that tiny amount of information was difficult to obtain, as it was scattered across several documents and source code files. New programmers with no open source project experience, as well as programming gurus, will be able to make source code contributions to Cygwin/X after reading this chapter. Programming gurus are great; our intention is to create more of them.
This document is primarily focused on the Cygwin/X X server; most other X.Org components are extremely stable and work out-of-the-box on Cygwin
The primary source of information on developing X is the X.Org developer startpage
Downloading the X Window System source code tree can take anywhere from 10 minutes to 10 hours, depending upon the speed of your network connection. If you have an active network connection at your disposal you may want to skip ahead to the Section called Obtaining the Source Code and start downloading the source code tree now. You will find it advantageous to have a source code tree as you read the other sections.