1Contributed Software 2 3Although these pieces are available as part of the official git 4source tree, they are in somewhat different status. The 5intention is to keep interesting tools around git here, maybe 6even experimental ones, to give users an easier access to them, 7and to give tools wider exposure, so that they can be improved 8faster. 9 10I am not expecting to touch these myself that much. As far as 11my day-to-day operation is concerned, these subdirectories are 12owned by their respective primary authors. I am willing to help 13if users of these components and the contrib/ subtree "owners" 14have technical/design issues to resolve, but the initiative to 15fix and/or enhance things _must_ be on the side of the subtree 16owners. IOW, I won't be actively looking for bugs and rooms for 17enhancements in them as the git maintainer -- I may only do so 18just as one of the users when I want to scratch my own itch. If 19you have patches to things in contrib/ area, the patch should be 20first sent to the primary author, and then the primary author 21should ack and forward it to me (git pull request is nicer). 22This is the same way as how I have been treating gitk, and to a 23lesser degree various foreign SCM interfaces, so you know the 24drill. 25 26I expect that things that start their life in the contrib/ area 27to graduate out of contrib/ once they mature, either by becoming 28projects on their own, or moving to the toplevel directory. On 29the other hand, I expect I'll be proposing removal of disused 30and inactive ones from time to time. 31 32If you have new things to add to this area, please first propose 33it on the git mailing list, and after a list discussion proves 34there are some general interests (it does not have to be a 35list-wide consensus for a tool targeted to a relatively narrow 36audience -- for example I do not work with projects whose 37upstream is svn, so I have no use for git-svn myself, but it is 38of general interest for people who need to interoperate with SVN 39repositories in a way git-svn works better than git-svnimport), 40submit a patch to create a subdirectory of contrib/ and put your 41stuff there. 42 43-jc 44