Mauro Carvalho Chehab 2006 Jan 28 This file describes general procedures used by v4l-dvb maintainers. Some of these also applies to patch submitters. We've moved from cvs to a modern SCM system that fits better into kernel development model, called Mercurial (aka hg). hg is organized with a master tag, called tip. This tag contains the master repository that will be used by normal users and to generate patches to kernel. It is strongly recommended that every developer use a local copy of the repository to make their own tests and use one or more tags for his own needs. Mercurial is a developer database, It means that it might be broken from time to time, although all efforts should be done to avoid this. There are more "stable" snapshots at http://www.linuxtv.org/downloads/snapshot page. This file postulates some simple rules for maintaing hg tree, as stated bellow: 1) It is strongly recommended that hg maintainers be active at IRC channels (irc://irc.freenode.net) #v4l (for analog) and/or #linuxtv (for digital). It helps to have more discussions at major changes; 2) Minor changes, like simple card additions (for example a new card row at a card struct) can be applied directly by the hg maintainer; 3) Medium changes that needs modification on card coding or creating a new card type should be discussed first at the Mailing Lists video4linux-list .at. redhat .dot. com (analog/common parts) and/or linux-dvb .at. linuxtv .dot. org to allow other contributors to discuss about the way it will be included. 4) Major changes that implies changing some core structs should be widely discussed on IRC, posted to the list, created a snapshot THEN committed to the tip branch. It is strongly recommended to use a branch or v4l_experimental area for such changes. 5) The v4l-dvb maintainer should be warned to create a snapshot if the changes could generate impacts on other cards BEFORE commiting the change to the tip tag; 6) Every CVS maintainer should follow the "rules of thumb" of kernel development stated at Linux source code, especially: Documenation/SubmittingPatches Documentation/SubmittingDrivers Documentation/CodingStyle 7) Non active CVS maintainers or that ones who doesn't like to follow these rules may be dropped. 8) Every commit should update ChangeLog describing who did, what changed and in what files, by using the command: make changes 9) The latest changelog line will be automatically used as a prototype to the commit message at the local repository by using: make commit 10) if commit go wrong, hg allows you to undo the last commit, by using the command: hg undo This command will preserve the changes at the files. So, a new hg commit will redo the desired commit. 11) To update master repository, it is needed to do: make pull 12) For hg to work properly, these vars should be defined (replacing the names at the left): CHANGE_LOG_NAME="Maintainer Name" CHANGE_LOG_EMAIL_ADDRESS=maintainer-email@cvsmaintainersite.com CHANGE_LOG_LOGIN=my_log_name HGUSER=$CHANGE_LOG_NAME export CHANGE_LOG_NAME CHANGE_LOG_EMAIL_ADDRESS CHANGE_LOG_LOGIN HGUSER It is recommended to have these lines at .bashrc or .profile. 13) All commit messages shall have a Developers Certificate of Origin version 1.1 at Changelog and cvs commit log, as postulated at kernel's source at: Documentation/SubmittingPatches This is done by using Signed-off-by: fields at hg commit message. It is not acceptable fake signatures like: Signed-off-by: Fake me The email should be a valid one. The bottom signed-off-by should be the CVS maintainer. This is an example of ChangeLog entry: 2005-06-28 18:35 cvsmaintainer * filelist.c, filelist.h: - described changes. Signed-off-by: Patch Developer Signed-off-by: Cvs Maintainer Obs.: Timestamp should be in GMT. 14) Commit messages are very rellevant, since they will be used when generating the patches for v4l-dvb.git and to mainstream. The format of commit message shall be: patch subject From: Patch Developer patch descriptions Signed-off-by: Patch Developer Signed-off-by: Cvs Maintainer Subject should be a brief description of the patch. Please notice that, with hg, There's no need (and not desired) to define a Subject: tag. The first msg line will be used as subject, just like git. From: shouldn't be suppressed You may add other signers, if the patch were tested by somebody else and he also wants to sign. The commiter signed-off-by should be the last one. 15) If the patch also affects other parts of kernel (like alsa or i2c), it is required that, at upstream submiting, the patch also go to the maintainers of that subsystem. To do this, CVS maintainer shall add one or more cc: fields at commit message, after the subject: CC: someotherkerneldeveloper@someplace Please notice that this is manually handled by the -git maintainer, so unnecessary usage should be avoided. 16) Sometimes, mainstream changes do affect v4l-dvb tree, and requires to apply some kernel patches at the tree. This kind of commit should follow the rules above and should also have a line like: kernel-sync Patches with such lines will not be submited upstream. 17) sometimes, it is necessary to introduce some testing code inside a module or remove parts that are not yet finished. Also, compatibility tests maybe required to provide backporting. To allow compatibility tests, "compat.h" should be included first. It does include also linux/version.h. To include testing code, #if 0 or #if 1 may be used. If this code is meant to go also to kernel, this struct shuld be used: #if 0 /* keep */ or #if 1 /* keep */ 18) Nested #ifs are allowed, but #elsif macro shouldn't be used, since the macro preprocessing script used to prepare kernel upstream patches (v4l/scripts/gentree.pl) is not able to handle it. Cheers, Mauro Mauro Carvalho Chehab