MS RFC 7: MapServer CVS Commit Management

Date:2005/09/22 Author:Frank Warmerdam Contact:warmerdam at pobox.com Last Edited:$Date$ Status:Adopted Id:$Id$

Note

This RFC is superseded by RFC 7.1

Purpose

To formalize CVS commit access, and specify some guidelines for CVS committers.

Election to CVS Commit Access

Permission for CVS commit access shall be provided to new developers only if accepted by the MapServer Technical Steering Committee. A proposal should be written to the TSC for new committers and voted on normally. It is not necessary to write an RFC document for these votes ... email to mapserver-dev is sufficient.

Removal of CVS commit access should be handled by the same process.

The new committer should have demonstrated commitment to MapServer and knowledge of the MapServer source code and processes to the committee’s satisfaction, usually by reporting bugs, submitting patches, and/or actively participating in the various MapServer forums.

The new committer should also be prepared to support any new feature or changes that he/she commits to the MapServer source tree in future releases, or to find someone to which to delegate responsibility for them if he/she stops being available to support the portions of code that he/she is responsible for.

All committers should also be a member of mapserver-dev mailing list so they can stay informed on policies, technical developments and release preparation.

Committer Tracking

A list of all project committers will be kept in the main mapserver directory (called COMMITTERS) listing for each CVS committer:

• Userid: the id that will appear in the CVS logs for this person.
• Full name: the users actual name.
• Email address: A current email address at which the committer can be reached. It may be altered in normal ways to make it harder to auto-harvest.
• A brief indication of areas of responsibility.

CVS Administrator

One member of the Technical Steering Committee will be designed the CVS Administrator. That person will be responsible for giving CVS commit access to folks, updating the COMMITERS file, and other CVS related management. That person will need login access on the CVS server of course.

Initially Steve Lime will be the CVS Adminstrator.

CVS Commit Practices

The following are considered good CVS commit practices for the MapServer project.

• Use meaningful descriptions for CVS commit log entries.
• Add a bug reference like “(bug 1232)” at the end of CVS commit log entries when committing changes related to a bug in bugzilla.
• Include an entry in the HISTORY file for any significant change or bug fix committed in the main MapServer source tree. Make sure it is placed under the correct version heading and include bug numbers in these messages too.
• Changes should not be committed in stable branches without a corresponding bug id and HISTORY entry. Any change worth pushing into the stable version is worth a bugzilla bug and good HISTORY notations.
• Never commit new features to a stable branch: only critical fixes. New features can only go in the main development trunk.
• Only bug fixes should be committed to the code during pre-release code freeze.
• Significant changes to the main development version should be discussed on the -dev list before you make them, and larger changes will require a RFC approved by the TSC.
• Do not create new branches without the approval of the TSC. Release managers are assumed to have permission to create a branch.
• All source code in CVS should be in Unix text format as opposed to DOS text mode.
• When committing new features or significant changes to existing source code, the committer should take reasonable measures to insure that the source code continues to build and work on the most commonly supported platforms (currently Linux and Windows), either by testing on those platforms directly, or by getting help from other developers working on those platforms. If new files or library dependencies are added, then the configure.in, Makefile.in, Makefile.vc and related documentations should be kept up to date.