Documentation / SubmittingPatcheson commit Merge branch 'master' of git://repo.or.cz/git-gui (67c7575)
   1I started reading over the SubmittingPatches document for Linux
   2kernel, primarily because I wanted to have a document similar to
   3it for the core GIT to make sure people understand what they are
   4doing when they write "Signed-off-by" line.
   5
   6But the patch submission requirements are a lot more relaxed
   7here on the technical/contents front, because the core GIT is
   8thousand times smaller ;-).  So here is only the relevant bits.
   9
  10
  11(1) Make separate commits for logically separate changes.
  12
  13Unless your patch is really trivial, you should not be sending
  14out a patch that was generated between your working tree and
  15your commit head.  Instead, always make a commit with complete
  16commit message and generate a series of patches from your
  17repository.  It is a good discipline.
  18
  19Describe the technical detail of the change(s).
  20
  21If your description starts to get too long, that's a sign that you
  22probably need to split up your commit to finer grained pieces.
  23
  24Oh, another thing.  I am picky about whitespaces.  Make sure your
  25changes do not trigger errors with the sample pre-commit hook shipped
  26in templates/hooks--pre-commit.  To help ensure this does not happen,
  27run git diff --check on your changes before you commit.
  28
  29
  30(2) Generate your patch using git tools out of your commits.
  31
  32git based diff tools (git, Cogito, and StGIT included) generate
  33unidiff which is the preferred format.
  34
  35You do not have to be afraid to use -M option to "git diff" or
  36"git format-patch", if your patch involves file renames.  The
  37receiving end can handle them just fine.
  38
  39Please make sure your patch does not include any extra files
  40which do not belong in a patch submission.  Make sure to review
  41your patch after generating it, to ensure accuracy.  Before
  42sending out, please make sure it cleanly applies to the "master"
  43branch head.  If you are preparing a work based on "next" branch,
  44that is fine, but please mark it as such.
  45
  46
  47(3) Sending your patches.
  48
  49People on the git mailing list need to be able to read and
  50comment on the changes you are submitting.  It is important for
  51a developer to be able to "quote" your changes, using standard
  52e-mail tools, so that they may comment on specific portions of
  53your code.  For this reason, all patches should be submitted
  54"inline".  WARNING: Be wary of your MUAs word-wrap
  55corrupting your patch.  Do not cut-n-paste your patch; you can
  56lose tabs that way if you are not careful.
  57
  58It is a common convention to prefix your subject line with
  59[PATCH].  This lets people easily distinguish patches from other
  60e-mail discussions.
  61
  62"git format-patch" command follows the best current practice to
  63format the body of an e-mail message.  At the beginning of the
  64patch should come your commit message, ending with the
  65Signed-off-by: lines, and a line that consists of three dashes,
  66followed by the diffstat information and the patch itself.  If
  67you are forwarding a patch from somebody else, optionally, at
  68the beginning of the e-mail message just before the commit
  69message starts, you can put a "From: " line to name that person.
  70
  71You often want to add additional explanation about the patch,
  72other than the commit message itself.  Place such "cover letter"
  73material between the three dash lines and the diffstat.
  74
  75Do not attach the patch as a MIME attachment, compressed or not.
  76Do not let your e-mail client send quoted-printable.  Do not let
  77your e-mail client send format=flowed which would destroy
  78whitespaces in your patches. Many
  79popular e-mail applications will not always transmit a MIME
  80attachment as plain text, making it impossible to comment on
  81your code.  A MIME attachment also takes a bit more time to
  82process.  This does not decrease the likelihood of your
  83MIME-attached change being accepted, but it makes it more likely
  84that it will be postponed.
  85
  86Exception:  If your mailer is mangling patches then someone may ask
  87you to re-send them using MIME, that is OK.
  88
  89Do not PGP sign your patch, at least for now.  Most likely, your
  90maintainer or other people on the list would not have your PGP
  91key and would not bother obtaining it anyway.  Your patch is not
  92judged by who you are; a good patch from an unknown origin has a
  93far better chance of being accepted than a patch from a known,
  94respected origin that is done poorly or does incorrect things.
  95
  96If you really really really really want to do a PGP signed
  97patch, format it as "multipart/signed", not a text/plain message
  98that starts with '-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----'.  That is
  99not a text/plain, it's something else.
 100
 101Note that your maintainer does not necessarily read everything
 102on the git mailing list.  If your patch is for discussion first,
 103send it "To:" the mailing list, and optionally "cc:" him.  If it
 104is trivially correct or after the list reached a consensus, send
 105it "To:" the maintainer and optionally "cc:" the list.
 106
 107Also note that your maintainer does not actively involve himself in
 108maintaining what are in contrib/ hierarchy.  When you send fixes and
 109enhancements to them, do not forget to "cc: " the person who primarily
 110worked on that hierarchy in contrib/.
 111
 112
 113(4) Sign your work
 114
 115To improve tracking of who did what, we've borrowed the
 116"sign-off" procedure from the Linux kernel project on patches
 117that are being emailed around.  Although core GIT is a lot
 118smaller project it is a good discipline to follow it.
 119
 120The sign-off is a simple line at the end of the explanation for
 121the patch, which certifies that you wrote it or otherwise have
 122the right to pass it on as a open-source patch.  The rules are
 123pretty simple: if you can certify the below:
 124
 125        Developer's Certificate of Origin 1.1
 126
 127        By making a contribution to this project, I certify that:
 128
 129        (a) The contribution was created in whole or in part by me and I
 130            have the right to submit it under the open source license
 131            indicated in the file; or
 132
 133        (b) The contribution is based upon previous work that, to the best
 134            of my knowledge, is covered under an appropriate open source
 135            license and I have the right under that license to submit that
 136            work with modifications, whether created in whole or in part
 137            by me, under the same open source license (unless I am
 138            permitted to submit under a different license), as indicated
 139            in the file; or
 140
 141        (c) The contribution was provided directly to me by some other
 142            person who certified (a), (b) or (c) and I have not modified
 143            it.
 144
 145        (d) I understand and agree that this project and the contribution
 146            are public and that a record of the contribution (including all
 147            personal information I submit with it, including my sign-off) is
 148            maintained indefinitely and may be redistributed consistent with
 149            this project or the open source license(s) involved.
 150
 151then you just add a line saying
 152
 153        Signed-off-by: Random J Developer <random@developer.example.org>
 154
 155This line can be automatically added by git if you run the git-commit
 156command with the -s option.
 157
 158Some people also put extra tags at the end.  They'll just be ignored for
 159now, but you can do this to mark internal company procedures or just
 160point out some special detail about the sign-off.
 161
 162
 163------------------------------------------------
 164MUA specific hints
 165
 166Some of patches I receive or pick up from the list share common
 167patterns of breakage.  Please make sure your MUA is set up
 168properly not to corrupt whitespaces.  Here are two common ones
 169I have seen:
 170
 171* Empty context lines that do not have _any_ whitespace.
 172
 173* Non empty context lines that have one extra whitespace at the
 174  beginning.
 175
 176One test you could do yourself if your MUA is set up correctly is:
 177
 178* Send the patch to yourself, exactly the way you would, except
 179  To: and Cc: lines, which would not contain the list and
 180  maintainer address.
 181
 182* Save that patch to a file in UNIX mailbox format.  Call it say
 183  a.patch.
 184
 185* Try to apply to the tip of the "master" branch from the
 186  git.git public repository:
 187
 188    $ git fetch http://kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git master:test-apply
 189    $ git checkout test-apply
 190    $ git reset --hard
 191    $ git applymbox a.patch
 192
 193If it does not apply correctly, there can be various reasons.
 194
 195* Your patch itself does not apply cleanly.  That is _bad_ but
 196  does not have much to do with your MUA.  Please rebase the
 197  patch appropriately.
 198
 199* Your MUA corrupted your patch; applymbox would complain that
 200  the patch does not apply.  Look at .dotest/ subdirectory and
 201  see what 'patch' file contains and check for the common
 202  corruption patterns mentioned above.
 203
 204* While you are at it, check what are in 'info' and
 205  'final-commit' files as well.  If what is in 'final-commit' is
 206  not exactly what you would want to see in the commit log
 207  message, it is very likely that your maintainer would end up
 208  hand editing the log message when he applies your patch.
 209  Things like "Hi, this is my first patch.\n", if you really
 210  want to put in the patch e-mail, should come after the
 211  three-dash line that signals the end of the commit message.
 212
 213
 214Pine
 215----
 216
 217(Johannes Schindelin)
 218
 219I don't know how many people still use pine, but for those poor
 220souls it may be good to mention that the quell-flowed-text is
 221needed for recent versions.
 222
 223... the "no-strip-whitespace-before-send" option, too. AFAIK it
 224was introduced in 4.60.
 225
 226(Linus Torvalds)
 227
 228And 4.58 needs at least this.
 229
 230---
 231diff-tree 8326dd8350be64ac7fc805f6563a1d61ad10d32c (from e886a61f76edf5410573e92e38ce22974f9c40f1)
 232Author: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@g5.osdl.org>
 233Date:   Mon Aug 15 17:23:51 2005 -0700
 234
 235    Fix pine whitespace-corruption bug
 236
 237    There's no excuse for unconditionally removing whitespace from
 238    the pico buffers on close.
 239
 240diff --git a/pico/pico.c b/pico/pico.c
 241--- a/pico/pico.c
 242+++ b/pico/pico.c
 243@@ -219,7 +219,9 @@ PICO *pm;
 244            switch(pico_all_done){      /* prepare for/handle final events */
 245              case COMP_EXIT :          /* already confirmed */
 246                packheader();
 247+#if 0
 248                stripwhitespace();
 249+#endif
 250                c |= COMP_EXIT;
 251                break;
 252 
 253
 254(Daniel Barkalow)
 255
 256> A patch to SubmittingPatches, MUA specific help section for
 257> users of Pine 4.63 would be very much appreciated.
 258
 259Ah, it looks like a recent version changed the default behavior to do the
 260right thing, and inverted the sense of the configuration option. (Either
 261that or Gentoo did it.) So you need to set the
 262"no-strip-whitespace-before-send" option, unless the option you have is
 263"strip-whitespace-before-send", in which case you should avoid checking
 264it.
 265
 266
 267Thunderbird
 268-----------
 269
 270(A Large Angry SCM)
 271
 272Here are some hints on how to successfully submit patches inline using
 273Thunderbird.
 274
 275This recipe appears to work with the current [*1*] Thunderbird from Suse.
 276
 277The following Thunderbird extensions are needed:
 278        AboutConfig 0.5
 279                http://aboutconfig.mozdev.org/
 280        External Editor 0.7.2
 281                http://globs.org/articles.php?lng=en&pg=8
 282
 2831) Prepare the patch as a text file using your method of choice.
 284
 2852) Before opening a compose window, use Edit->Account Settings to
 286uncheck the "Compose messages in HTML format" setting in the
 287"Composition & Addressing" panel of the account to be used to send the
 288patch. [*2*]
 289
 2903) In the main Thunderbird window, _before_ you open the compose window
 291for the patch, use Tools->about:config to set the following to the
 292indicated values:
 293        mailnews.send_plaintext_flowed  => false
 294        mailnews.wraplength             => 0
 295
 2964) Open a compose window and click the external editor icon.
 297
 2985) In the external editor window, read in the patch file and exit the
 299editor normally.
 300
 3016) Back in the compose window: Add whatever other text you wish to the
 302message, complete the addressing and subject fields, and press send.
 303
 3047) Optionally, undo the about:config/account settings changes made in
 305steps 2 & 3.
 306
 307
 308[Footnotes]
 309*1* Version 1.0 (20041207) from the MozillaThunderbird-1.0-5 rpm of Suse
 3109.3 professional updates.
 311
 312*2* It may be possible to do this with about:config and the following
 313settings but I haven't tried, yet.
 314        mail.html_compose                       => false
 315        mail.identity.default.compose_html      => false
 316        mail.identity.id?.compose_html          => false
 317
 318
 319Gnus
 320----
 321
 322'|' in the *Summary* buffer can be used to pipe the current
 323message to an external program, and this is a handy way to drive
 324"git am".  However, if the message is MIME encoded, what is
 325piped into the program is the representation you see in your
 326*Article* buffer after unwrapping MIME.  This is often not what
 327you would want for two reasons.  It tends to screw up non ASCII
 328characters (most notably in people's names), and also
 329whitespaces (fatal in patches).  Running 'C-u g' to display the
 330message in raw form before using '|' to run the pipe can work
 331this problem around.
 332
 333
 334KMail
 335-----
 336
 337This should help you to submit patches inline using KMail.
 338
 3391) Prepare the patch as a text file.
 340
 3412) Click on New Mail.
 342
 3433) Go under "Options" in the Composer window and be sure that
 344"Word wrap" is not set.
 345
 3464) Use Message -> Insert file... and insert the patch.
 347
 3485) Back in the compose window: add whatever other text you wish to the
 349message, complete the addressing and subject fields, and press send.