Re: contribution checklist in the wiki

[Pedro Alves <palves@redhat.com>]

On 05/20/2013 11:06 AM, Joel Brobecker wrote:
>> I've created a new page in the wiki:
>>
>>  http://sourceware.org/gdb/wiki/ContributionChecklist
>>
>> This was heavily borrowed from glibc's own contribution checklist.
>> (I asked them if they were okay before doing it.)
> 
> I think it's a good idea. It's a little bit of a bummer that this
> overlaps with CONTRIBUTE, because I think that the two documents
> may diverge at some point.

IMO, having CONTRIBUTE in the source tree is a bit questionable.
E.g., a user might write a patch against 7.5, and send it to the list,
using the guidelines from 7.5's CONTRIBUTE file.  But, that file might
well be outdated.  The guidelines that really matter are the one's gdb
developers follow at present, which may already be different from
the one's in 7.5's CONTRIBUTE.  I'd vote for migrating parts of the text
from CONTRIBUTE under "Submitting Patches" and "Supplemental information
for GDB" to the wiki.  But we can leave CONTRIBUTE alone until the
documents actually diverge.

> Are we re-introducing the use of "patch" in email submissions?
> Its use was unofficially discouraged I believe by Andrew Cagney,
> who thought it was ambiguous (re: checked in or not?). 

I didn't know it was discouraged.  [PATCH] never implied the
patch has been checked in to me.  For me, it's somewhat useful as
distinguishing the email from one about gdb internals (an RFC on some
internals, etc.) that doesn't come with a patch, as we often
see on gdb-patches@, despite the list's name.  I notice some of us
are using "FYI/fyi" or "COMMIT/commit" to explicitly indicate
"checked in".  I like that, and I've doing using COMMIT myself now.
Particularly, since I'm making the effort to put the rationale
for a patch in the cvs commit log, I find it better to write
"commit" in the subject line, rather than in the body of the
message (which ends up turned into the commit log entry),
as "Checked in." in the cvs/git log is useless and weird info.  :-)

I don't think we need to be super strict about these tags.
[PATCH]/[patch]/nothing is the same to me, as is
[RFC PATCH] vs [RFC][PATCH].  But I do think it's good to have
simple guidelines, mostly for people who are newcomers to the community.
Not listing many alternative choices to express the same is a feature, IMO.

This part of the wiki page was mostly still untouched compared to glibc's,
and comparing it to patches sent to libc-alpha@, we see that they aren't
strict with these either -- lots of patch submissions without "[PATCH]".

> I don't mind, and it makes things simpler for git users, where PATCH
> is the default for format-patch (which is used by send-email).

Yeah.  I've been using [PATCH] ever since I switched to git/stgit.  :-)

-- 
Pedro Alves