[stp-dev] STP Committer/Developer commit process page

[David Bosschaert <davidb@xxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

Here's is an initial cut at a commit process page. Its based on what was 
discussed last week at the IRC.

BTW I left the section about 'Communication your desires/intentions' 
(which is about what features are being developed) since it needs input 
from PMC. We could go with the WTP approach (which uses Bugzilla for 
this).


Please comment before next IRC (Wednesday).

Thanks,

David

Title: Eclipse Web Tools Platform Project Development

eclipse SOA tools platform project contributing to the SOA project

This document was inspired by the Contributing to the WTP document

Introduction

People often ask, "What does it take to get involved with the development of the STP?" There are many ways to get involved. On the lightweight end of scale, there is involvement by using the STP and providing feedback and sharing your experiences on the Eclipse and STP newsgroups. Beyond that, you can report problems that you discover, so that they may be addressed in future releases. A deeper level of involvement would be to actually solve some of the problems that you or others have uncovered by modifying/writing the necessary code and creating patches that can applied by the project committers. The final, and most beneficial way to get involved is to take responsibility for a significant piece of development work, whether it's enhancing a particular area of the tool or creating new functionality.

The purpose of this document is to help people and organizations understand what it means to "commit" to STP Development at this highest level. Basically, it involves a commitment to describe, develop, test and document your contributions.

Commitment to Development

Communicating Your Desires/Intentions

...

Becoming a committer

Every developer's contribution is welcomed. And by the time, developers can become committers. A committer is a developer who has write access to the source code repository for the associated subproject (or component), and has voting rights allowing to affect the future of the subproject (or component); other developers define patches and submit them, indirectly, through committers. A developer gains such committer rights through frequent and valuable contributions to a subproject, or component of a subproject (in the case of large subprojects). We should point out that creating and submitting quality patches is the best way to obtain committer privileges for future work.

Code submission process

Before code is committed in to CVS, it needs to go through the following process:

• Automated build: all new code should be automatically built by the STP build system. In some cases this could mean that the proposed submission also contains modifications to the build system.

• Automated tests: all code should come with automated tests, which should run as part of the overall test cycle. The build-system provides a test coverage measurement tool. Test coverage should be as high as possible, but certainly not below 70%.

• Review: when you are happy with your code and the tests, you should get your code reviewed by another committer. This review process can be done in a variety of ways:

  • by actually showing the code to the other committer, if you are working from the same location.

  • by emailing the code to another committer and conducting a remote review

  • by showing the code to another committer from your machine using a remote desktop sharing tool such as TightVNC (http://sourceforge.net/projects/vnc-tight).

  When the other committer is also happy with the code you can proceed with the commit. If the original developer is not a committer the reviewer will have to do the commit.

• Change Log: on the commit, a detailed log entry needs to be provided (using the -m switch on the commit command) that contains the following information:

  • Name of the developer and name of the reviewer (committer).

  • Revision number.

  • Brief description of the feature or fix, including a description of any new configuration, API or user interface.

• An email needs to be sent to stp-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx containing:

  • The same information as in the Log above, plus:

  • A list of the files affected by the check-in.

Commitment to Documentation

An important part of any enhancement or addition to the STP is making sure that the on-line help of the tool stays current with the changes. The responsibility for updating/modifying/writing the on-line help content that is associated with some part of the tool lies with the contributors of the code. Unless the contributors have commit privileges, the on-line documentation content would get submitted as a patch, much the same as code. And, like code, producing and submitting quality documentation patches is the way to obtain documentation committer privileges.

Until a Documentation Style Guide is available for the STP project, you may refer to the CDT Documentation Style Guide to help maintain a constant look and feel for documentation originating from different contributors. There also a couple of links that take you to additional information on how to contribute help content for Eclipse projects.

So, finally, committing to contribute code to the STP also means committing to contributing the associated on-line documentation content for the part of the tool that is being enhanced or created.