HACKING

   1 Here are some guidelines for working on the Guile source tree at GNU.
   2
   3 - As for any part of Project GNU, changes to Guile should follow the
   4 GNU coding standards.  The standards are available via anonymous FTP
   5 from prep.ai.mit.edu, as /pub/gnu/standards/standards.texi and
   6 make-stds.texi.
   7
   8 - Check Makefile.in and configure files into CVS, as well as any files
   9 used to create them (Makefile.am, configure.in); don't check in
  10 Makefiles or header files generated by configuration scripts.  The
  11 general rule is that you should be able to check out a working
  12 directory of Guile from CVS, and then type "configure" and "make".
  13
  14 - Make sure your changes compile and work, at least on your own
  15 machine, before checking them into the main branch of the Guile
  16 repository.  If you really need to check in untested changes, make a
  17 branch.
  18
  19 - When you make a user-visible change (i.e. one that should be
  20 documented, and appear in NEWS, put an asterisk in column zero of the
  21 start of the ChangeLog entry, like so:
  22
  23 Sat Aug  3 01:27:14 1996  Gary Houston  <ghouston@actrix.gen.nz>
  24
  25 *       * fports.c (scm_open_file): don't return #f, throw error.
  26
  27 When you've written a NEWS entry and updated the documentation, go
  28 ahead and remove the asterisk.  I will use the asterisks to find and
  29 document changes that haven't been dealt with before a release.
  30
  31 - Include each log entry in both the ChangeLog and in the CVS logs.
  32 If you're using Emacs, the pcl-cvs interface to CVS has features to
  33 make this easier; it checks the ChangeLog, and generates good default
  34 CVS log entries from that.
  35
  36 - There's no need to keep a change log for documentation files.  This
  37 is because documentation is not susceptible to bugs that are hard to
  38 fix.  Documentation does not consist of parts that must interact in a
  39 precisely engineered fashion; to correct an error, you need not know
  40 the history of the erroneous passage.  (This is copied from the GNU
  41 coding standards.)
  42
  43 - If you add or remove files, don't forget to update the appropriate
  44 part of the relevant Makefile.am files, and regenerate the
  45 Makefile.in.  If you forget this, the snapshot and distribution
  46 processes will not work.
  47
  48 - Make sure you have papers from people before integrating their
  49 changes or contributions.  This is very frustrating, but very
  50 important to do right.  From maintain.texi, "Information for
  51 Maintainers of GNU Software":
  52
  53     When incorporating changes from other people, make sure to follow the
  54     correct procedures.  Doing this ensures that the FSF has the legal
  55     right to distribute and defend GNU software.
  56
  57     For the sake of registering the copyright on later versions ofthe
  58     software you need to keep track of each person who makes significant
  59     changes.  A change of ten lines or so, or a few such changes, in a
  60     large program is not significant.
  61
  62     *Before* incorporating significant changes, make sure that the person
  63     has signed copyright papers, and that the Free Software Foundation has
  64     received them.
  65
  66 If you receive contributions you want to use from someone, let me know
  67 and I'll take care of the administrivia.  Put the contributions aside
  68 until we have the necessary papers.
  69
  70 - When you make substantial changes to a file, add the current year to
  71 the list of years in the copyright notice at the top of the file.
  72
  73
  74 Jim Blandy