This file contains guidelines for those with CVS write access.
They have been adapted from the guidelines for gnome-libs by
Miguel de Icaza who adapted them from guidelines written by
Owen Taylor.

 + Ask first. If your changes are major, or could possibly break existing
   code, you should always ask. If your change is minor and you have
   been working on gnucash for a while it is probably not necessary
   to ask. But when in doubt, ask. Even if your change is correct,
   somebody may know a better way to do things.

   If you want other people to review your code before it goes in,
   you can submit your changes as a patch to gnucash-patches@gnucash.org.
   See README.patches for details.

   If you are making changes to gnucash CVS, you should be subscribed
   to gnucash-devel@gnucash.org and to gnucash-patches@gnucash.org.
   (Subscription address: http://www.gnucash.org/en/lists.phtml)
   gnucash-devel@gnucash.org is a good place to ask about intended
   changes.

 + There must be a ChangeLog entry for every commit. If you discover that
   you only committed half the files you meant to and need to fix that
   up you do not need a new ChangeLog entry.  But in general, ChangeLog
   entries are mandatory. Changes with out ChangeLog entries will be
   reverted.

 + When you commit, use your ChangeLog entry as the log message.

 + You must not break the build! Never check in changes that do not
   compile, install or run. Just because your local tree compiles
   doesn't mean you are done. The most common way to break the build
   is to forget to add new files or directories to CVS. But it is easy
   to fix this problem:

    +  Keep two directories, one where you make changes and another
       'pristine' tree that you keep up to date. As soon as you check
       in changes to your working tree, update the pristine tree then
       recompile, install and run the pristine version. If you forgot
       to add some new files, it will quickly show up.

 + Try not to break 'make dist' tarballs. These are generally broken
   by not updating Makefile.am files when files are added or removed
   to the repository.

 + Only one person (currently Dave Peticolas) should commit changes
   to stable branches. If you have changes to a stable branch, send
   them to gnucash-patches@gnucash.org.

 + Only one person (currently Dave Peticolas) should commit patches
   from new developers.

 + If you are going to be changing many files in an experimental fashion,
   it is probably a good idea to create a separate branch for your
   changes. Please see the CVS info documentation to see how to create
   a branch. Also, please inform the gnucash-devel-list about what you
   are going to do.

 + The ChangeLog entries should preferably match in date format with
   the existing entries. You can set how emacs does this by using
   customize mode:

   - M-x customize

Dave Peticolas
May 2, 2001